How To Fix A Slow Wireless Connection With The Intel Pro 5100 ABGN Wireless Adapter in Linux

Now that my HP Pavillion DV7-2180US laptop is working again I ran in to a little snafu getting my Intel Pro 5100 ABGN wireless adapter to work in Linux. I tried every Linux distribution in my arsenal – Sabayon, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mageia, Mepis, and others – trying to find one that would work properly with my Intel Pro 5100 ABGN wireless adapter. All of them had the same problem: they would connect, but the connection would be extremely slow. I finally went to Google to try to figure out what was going wrong. There I found that I was not alone. There were several fixes posted but none of them worked right – they either still left me with a slow connection or made my Intel Pro 5100 ABGN wireless adapter unusable.

I finally hit upon the right fix with some experimentation with what I already knew had fixed the connection in the past (most of the posts about this issue were at least a year old).

The fix is this: Open up /etc/modules with your favorite text editor as root or superuser, and add this line:

iwlagn 11n_disable=1

Then save and exit. Finally reboot your computer. You should have a working wireless connection now that isn’t slow.

The problem is that the Intel Pro 5100 ABGN wireless driver doesn’t operate well with wireless N turned on. This fix turns the Wireless N off so you’re now operating on Wireless G. I wish one of the distributions I mentioned would implement this in their settings, however, my research has shown this bug to be triaged and ignored. So those of us with the Intel Pro 5100 ABGN wireless adapter must fend for ourselves. It’s a good thing this is a simple fix to do!

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