Fedora 12 won't roll from access point to access point with same SSID?

Roasted · #1 6th January 2010, 04:15 PM

I've been playing around with a ton of distros lately. So far my best experience has been with openSuSE. But I keep eyeing up Fedora thinking there's just something about it that I dig.

So I fire up Fedora 12 KDE on my laptop, pull down rpmfusion, install broadcom-wl for my wireless, and I'm good to go.

Here at work we have a WPA2 secured network with about 30 access points, all with the same SSID. With other distros I could slowly walk down the hall and it would just bounce from one to another to another, with the signal bars actively showing the signal strength - signifying I was indeed roaming from AP to AP. Okay, good.

But with Fedora 12 it seems like whatever signal bar I get when I originally connect is the bars it'll be stuck on. For example, I'm connected now with an access point right above my head. 5/5 signal with that AP. But if I walk to the other side of the building, it still says 5/5 signal - then randomly decides to disconnect - despite me being right underneath another AP.

I go back to my original location, blam. It connects. I go anywhere else, it can't connect.

Is there anything else I can do to get this guy rolling?

EDIT - I'm not sure where the differences lie, but here's my findings on different distros that I had on this exact laptop. I was continually playing with new distros and making image backups (thanks clonezilla) so I could play with new distros in a native setting on my laptop to -really- test them out.

Kubuntu - broadcom driver works fine - rolls from AP to AP with no issues.
Fedora 12 KDE - broadcom-wl driver required to run - does not roll from AP to AP - uses knetworkmanager just like Kubuntu.
Mandriva 2010 - dkms-broadcom-wl driver required to run - rolls seamlessly from AP to AP - uses its own (and very nice) network manager.

At first I wanted to blame knetworkmanager, but Kubuntu uses it too with no issues.
Then I wanted to blame broadcom-wl driver in Fedora, but the dkms-broadcom-wl driver in Mandriva's repos is the same thing from what I understand.
Not too sure if I'll bother trying F12 again on here since I have Mandriva working great on it now, but I have to wonder what it was with Fedora 12 that didn't play nice.