New XPS 13 Ivy Bridge w Ubuntu 12.04 - no stable wireless

Hello Statik1909,

The new XPS has been shipped and I shall receive it thursday according to tracking. I will post updates next week.

J

I think this is possibly my issue

bugs.launchpad.net/.../901410

Possible fix is to add the PPA to repo and updating

launchpad.net/.../sputnik-kernel

Testing this tonight

I received a new replacement XPS and did some relatively good testing with it. The good news is that the wifi seems to work on all b,g and n band. The bad news is that there are many Fn keys that simply do not work even though I added the canonical untrusted sputnik kernel ppa and did all the recommended updates. So now, I have 1 XPS that works very well except for the wifi and one XPS that has a working wifi but all sorts of other problems which renders it more useless than the first one.

It's sad because I just love this ultrabook and really want to make this work.

This is really deceiving.

Jacques

I'm having this same problem.  I'm on an enterprise wireless network, HP access points.  Seems like when the WPA/WPA2 rekeys or something the connection drops and it takes a reboot to get it back.  I'll look at the PPA above and see if it helps...

I get odd messages in my syslog when I've been dropped and are unable to connect.  Anyone else with this problem check their syslog?  Also, appears if I do an sudo ifconfig wlan0 down, it will reconnect without having to reboot...

Hello Jacques,

Did the replacement fix the problem for you? I have an XPS 13 Developer Edition and I think I'm experiencing the same problem.

Thanks.

Yes it did. The new unit wifi is rock solid.

I returned the defective unit to the technical analyst who assisted me and they will work

with it to find the source of this problem.

Jacques

Great to hear Jacques!

Hi Jacques,

I'm experiencing the exact same issue. I'm wondering if anyone has resolved the issues with the iwlwifi driver.

nkezhaya,

Good to hear, thanks for reporting back.

I called Dell, and they sent someone out to replace to 6235 chip in the laptop. Ever since the replacement, it's been working great.

Hi, I just received my XPS 13 with HD screen and it's just fantastic. But I was not happy with the partition of the SDD and so installed Kubuntu 12.04 and enabled Sputnik ppa.

Now uname -a gives

Linux Elektra-Nxt 3.2.0-39-generic #62+kamal15~DellXPS-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 4 19:08:48 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

but I'm experiencing really slow wifi compared to my old laptop (Acer Timelinex) with same distro.

With the Acer I'm up to 63 Mbps in download and 19Mbps in upload.

With my Dell it's not more than 1.12 Mbps in dl and 3.10 in ul!

Today I'll try to install on a second partition Ubuntu 12.10... but I'd really love to have it working on the 12.04!

Any help appreciated...

Hi Barton and Team,

Firstly, thanks for producing such an amazing laptop! It's an excellent piece of kit :)

Unfortunately, I am here too to highlight wireless issues, and am also very keen to find a resolution on them.

In my case I've got the XPS 13 with factory Sputnik build of 12.04 LTS, and see connection drops on my home wifi, a Virgin Media Superhub (which is a rebranded Netgear of some sort) running on 802.11n, as well as my Huawei E585 Mifi dongle while in transit, and the BT Homehub ADSL router at my client's site that they have for off corporate network testing; all secured with WPA-AES.

These are annoying, but are irregular enough to constitute a nuisance rather than a real problem.

What *is* a real problem is how this issue is massively exacerbated by the PEAP / MSCHAPv2 Enterprise authentication for my client's corporate network. Sometimes it will stay stable for several hours, but when it's having a bad day like today it will drop after only a few minutes, and not reconnect for a long time, and sometimes it won't at all without manual intervention from me; stopping and starting network-manager, re-saving the wireless credentials (unchanged from their previous state) and so on.

This is not only massively impacting my productivity but also very embarrassing when in a meeting with my clients.

I had hoped to stay with 12.04 given that it's an LTS release, but I guess my first port of call will be to upgrade to 12.10 and then 13.04 next month and see if the new kernel and iwlwifi.ko change anything.

Other than this wireless issue I absolutely love my XPS 13 Sputnik Edition. It replaced an XPS 14z which I now can't look at the screen of because the difference in quality is night and day (as an aside, I never could understand why the XPS 14z which was another great laptop was let down by such an awful screen).

Fwiw I had similar issues with the XPS 14z running 12.04 and latterly 12.10, but nowhere near as bad as with the XPS 13. I'm not sure which wireless card the XPS 14z uses but there does definitely seem to be latent issues with the wireless driver and/or firmware for recent Centrino platform variants.

Here's hoping for a solution, I'll report back once I've upgraded.

My wireless has been just as unstable on 12.10 as 12.04. Almost daily at work on an enterprise router, I have to restart the Network Manager without 802.11n support

sudo pkill NetworkManager; sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi ; sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

This usually fixes the problem for a few hours, but when it acts up, I usually end up tethering to my phone, so it's got to be some weird combination of wifi and these enterprise routers.