I installed wattOS R10. Though R10 had worked perfectly when live-booted from a DVD, my wireless adapter started acting up after I installed R10 to my hard disk drive. This isn't an entirely new problem; my previous Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system would occasionally drop its connection to my Motorola G4 Plus smartphone hotspot (ATT service), though its wireless connection is solid with nearly all other wireless routers and hotspots. Sadly, my old Ubuntu workaround does not allow me to quickly re-establish a connection after a disconnect (simply disabling wireless and then turning it back on using the panel GUI). With wattOS, I must reboot, and even logging-off and back on doesn't reconnect the wireless. Toggling the wireless connection using the wattOS panel GUI results in losing the signal strength bar, though "ifconfig" from a terminal reports that it's still connected. Unfortunately, the problem occurs far too often to make such reboots practical.

So I quickly gave up on wattOS and installed Peppermint, which hasn't exhibited this problem in several hours of use. (I've run both OS'es live and from a hard disk long enough that I think I'm not just being fooled by the intermittent nature of the problem.)

I'm having some regrets in giving up too soon, however, because Peppermint doesn't seem to be quite as "light" and snappy as wattOS. Surprisingly, even Peppermint's Chromium browser seems to be a little slower than Firefox under wattOS. (But maybe this is related to the wireless differences!) Perhaps R10 from the hard disk uses a proprietary Qualcomm adapter. (I did check the box for proprietary modules when installing both wattOS and Peppermint.) Perhaps a proprietary driver was installed under R10, which offered greater connection speed but also exhibits the instability.

Might I be successful with a nuke and repave with R10 but not checking the proprietary driver box this time?

~ $ lspci | grep -i wireless
05:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

I'm very impressed with wattOS's speed on this old netbook (Unity was, of course, pathetic) and also with the quality and usability of this forum (and support is a big part of adopting an OS too). I also worked for Intel in the Portland area for 20 years, so maybe biff's and wattOS's home base imparts some appeal to me too!

Thanks for any ideas or advice.

-Cal