Sunday 20 December 2015

Ubuntu 14.04 on Lenovo ideapad 100-14IBY (Part 3)

This is the third post on the same topic, part 1 covers hardware details and issues I encountered with the ideapad while part 2 covers the main steps to resolve the most critical issues. This post covers further improvement to the WiFi stability issue.

WiFi stability improvements

The RTL8723be was always disconnecting after a few minutes of operation in the beginning. This issue has been largely improved by disabling hardware encryption, as described in the previous post. Due to the lack of time for more extensive testing, I settled with these settings and asked for a week of test drive. Feedback was that after the WiFi card still disconnected after a couple of hours.

I intuited that the network disconnect could have probably been experienced after a longer period of network inactivity (having left the ideapad on it's own), which led me to the dig into settings around power management of the WiFi card.

Having read up on the topic and after initial trial and error I settled with adding two further module parameters, one for disallowing the firmware to control link power saving, and another one for disabling link power saving in general.


echo "options rtl8723be swenc=1 fwlps=0 ips=0" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf

sudo modprobe -rv rtl8723be
sudo modprobe -v rtl8723be
# confirm parameter values under /sys/module/rtl8192be/parameters

Feedback so far confirmed the current configuration is not prone to getting disconnected. After the holidays I will attempt to narrow down the set of required parameters, first by re-enabling hardware encryption, then experimenting with the two new parameters.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you so very much!
    You made this cheapo laptop a great buy for my studies.
    Everything worked perfectly and was had quite a bit of fun reading your trial&error.

    Many thanks again

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  2. That is great to hear, thanks for the feedback!

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  3. I've installed centos 7 on my Ideapad 100-15IBY. and i'm unable to find wifi drivers for it. kindly help me in resolving this issue

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  4. Was anyone successful in installing wifi on the 11 inch version of the laptop. i.e., Idepad 100S 11-IBY ?

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