Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 129952
Wireless link monitor applet always shows 100% signal quality
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:47 EST
I'm using the prism54 driver for my NetGear WG511 card. This driver reports statistics properly in /proc/net/wireless: $ cat /proc/net/wireless Inter-| sta-| Quality | Discarded packets | Missed face | tus | link level noise | nwid crypt frag retry misc | beacon eth1: 0000 197. 194. 238. 0 0 0 0 0 0 The problem at hand is, that the wireless monitor applet calculates the link quality percentage with a quality value range of 0..92 in mind and does NOT check the range reported by the driver as it should. The prism54 reports values up to ~250. As a result, the link quality percentage displayed virtually never goes below 100%. The problem is know to the GNOME folks: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119472 but it seems that they are too bored to fix it properly. :-) Can we have a local fix in Fedora? Above bug reports includes a proposed patch. $ rpm -q gnome-applets gnome-applets-2.4.1-1 I guess the problem is also existent in FC2 and current rawhide, so feel free to upgrade the report.
As the upstream bug report suggest, the problem isn't an easy one, nor is the patch workable since it will probably give worse results for most cards. The problem is relatively high on my priority list since the gnome-netstatus applet has the same problem and I have a WG511 too, but I'd prefer to track this upstream. No need to track the same problem in two places. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119472