Re: A bit more on Bookworm and WiFi problens

On 11/11/2024 22:20, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Apolgies for the mixup. I meant to report that the behavior of
the internal wifi seems to be affected by both use of wired ethernet
and use of usb wifi. The internal wifi connected spontaneously after
connecting either a wired ethernet cable or a usb-wifi dongle. Alas,
that behavior is not repeatable. In the present config the usb-wifi
dongle connects, I can't get the internal wifi to connect though
it does detect the access point.

That does sound like some of the Network Manager behaviour I've experienced on a couple of Linux Mint laptops.

There does seem to be a large discrepancy between wlan0 and wlan1
signal strength: wlan1 reports 93-96%, internal wlan0 only 79%.
Prior to the recent upgrades (but still bookworm) wlan0 reporting
more than about 70% gave a decent connection.

The WiFi antenna on the motherboard is very small, as long as it's a normal sized USB WiFi stuck and not one of the tiny nub ones, it's antenna will be far bigger.
That's why I used dongles in the shed at the bottom of the garden for years with the Pi 1 and then 2, as the signal strength was better than a Pi 3 with built in WiFi, although the reliability of the dongles wasn't great. Incidentally I'm now using my first Asus router as an Ethernet to WiFi bridge, which connects to the house easily over 5GHz with it's large triple antenna.

Did you start with a fresh Bookworm image?

Initialy, yes. It was customized on microSD,
moved to a USB hard disk using Raspberry Pi Imager.

So it's a vanilla install using NetWork Manager and not an upgrade from Bullseye as I've been doing to retain the old well working DHCPCD and WPA supplicant networking.

What have you installed since?

Nothing apart from supplied upgrades, but I am using wayland, which
has been described as troublesome.

It can be, but not usually to networking.

What other hardware is connected?

One powered hub, running the added usb-wifi dongle
(old Ralink RT5370) plus an old Dell keyboard and mouse..
 

Are you using an official power supply?

No, but the Pi5 reads 5.07 volts at the GPIO header.
 As this saga plays out the USB-Wifi dongle seems to
work quite well. Maybe it's all down to the better
signal strength. Because the problem appeared shortly
after an OS upgrade I tended to blame that. Perhaps
I'm mistaken.

Normally on Pi's I'd be looking at a hardware issue to do with the power supply and the amount of USB devices connected, but I think you are right in this case, and it's Network Manager getting confused about what interfaces are available.
---druck