WLan power saving?

If you install the Atheros control panel and driver under Windows XP, you get the option of choosing different power saving levels for the WLan.
In my experience, setting Power Saving to maximum adds about 15-20 minutes of battery life on the 3-cell during light browsing, without compromising performance noticeably.

Having switched to Ubuntu, I'm unable to find any options for WLan power saving. What's the default power saving mode? Can it be changed anywhere?

 

It doesn't seam to be available with either madwifi(ATH_PCI) or ath5k.

But the windows driver (net5211) works under ndiswrapper just fine, and the power saving with it looks real good. My powertop numbers go as low as 7.2 (previous best 7.8). Definitly a function of power mnanagement,as w/o "iwconfig wlan0 power on" (which enables power mnanagemnet) my numbers are worse than the ath_pci driver by a little.

If nobody beets me to it I will post instructions in the AM (I left the link at the office, thought I had already posted it but must have forgot to hit submit).

 

That's interesting. Do the WLan toggle switch and LED work with the windows drivers? If not I guess better battery life is more important to me anyway. I'll definitely try this.

Edit: I could really use a tutorial... Haven't managed to get it to work so far Don't even think I have the right driver as I believe you're supposed to use an older one that has vanished from the net.

 

The NDIS portion is near trivial and the problem is finding the .inf/.sys files.

Alas, as of now I have lost my link. It actually took me almost 2 hours of google time to find somebody who actually had a good download of these files.

But why do you not just use those on yours Windows distro? That should be best in theory,

I will try and re-find my links when I have some time. Will also be glad to upload the .inf/.sys files to anyplace.

 

The latest XP drivers from Acer are no longer identified as net5211 but something else (can't remember what at the moment), and they do not work..unless I did something else wrong.

I managed to find the net5211 drivers in a "Vista downgrade" package for a completely different laptop, but those won't install, it just sais Invalid Driver.

So I don't think I've managed to find the correct drivers yet.

 

Try this

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-setup-a ... apper.html

BTW, I lost the link and the only way I could find it was by searching on the tarball filename for the drivers. It really is a bitch to find these guys. And my lights do not work anymore.