Thinkpads Forum

Ok, when it comes to Linux I'm totally clueless, I admit it. I've played around with Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu and a couple others, installing them on a spare disk in my T20, but I always got frustrated quickly and gave up.

Last night I decided to take another crack at it (i'm really tired of Windows!), so I got the Ubuntu Live CD (5.04) and booted it on my T42p.

Everything worked pretty well except that the wireless radio light was going on and off randomly. Now I don't use wireless at home, and I like to keep the radio turned off.

Ok, hit Fn+5 - nothing happens. Not surprising, must be another way. Try everything under System, Administration Tools, Device Manager, etc. The card (IBM 11a/b/g) seems to have been detected and set up properly, it is shown in Device Manager, is shown under Network as not configured, but how the heck do you turn it off?

Try the Ubuntu Wiki - no entry for wireless. Try the Ubuntu newsgroups, try googling, it seems no one has ever had the idea of turning off the wireless radio except for me. Give up after 2 hours.

Two questions:

1. How do I turn off the radio (simple please)?
2. Why does it have to be so hard to find out how to do simple things in Linux? I SO want to dump Windows, but every time I try to learn Linux it becomes a frustration festival.

Ed Gibbs

Does the command described here do the job?

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-22888.html

(Haven't tried it myself....)

Thanks - good find, looks like it should work but doesn't seem to - at least the wireless LED stays on after I run it.

I tried running it by double clicking and selecting "Run" and "Run in Terminal" but no effect. So I opened a terminal window, figured out how to navigate to /etc/acpi and tried to run it from there so I could see the output - but I'm too clueless to figure out how to run a script. Typing wireless or wireless.sh just returns "wireless: command not found."

Maybe ACPI is not properly configured?

Edit: I found iwconfig. It reports that power management is off on ath0. Tried setting it on but it fails - operation not permitted. So I'm guessing my guess is right - acpi is not configured or the IBM card isn't supporting it.

What is the risk of running with the radio on? It makes me uncomfortable, especially as I know nothing about configuring the Linux firewall. I have this dread that with the radio on my machine is wide open to anyone with a Pringles can. Probably not that bad, but still discomforting.

Ed Gibbs

From the top line menu, choose Application/System Tools/Root Terminal

In the terminal, type:

/etc/acpi/wireless.sh

This should turn off the wireless card. You won't see anything happen in the terminal itself, however. Type it again turn on the card.

If you decide to cd to /etc/acpi you have to type this in the terminal:

./wireless.sh

Just plain "wireless.sh" won't do it.

If you want to see something in the terminal, make a copy of the wireless.sh script (cp wireless.sh mywireless.sh), edit it (I use pico to edit files in unix), and add a line like this *beneath* each of the lines that begins "echo"

echo Wireless Device OFF

(or ON as the case may be). Then run mywireless.sh and you'll see the result.

if you want to execute ,for example a scipt, in "standard" Terminal try
the command "sudo" before the command:

ex: sudo /etc/acpi/wireless.sh

sudo will ask for your password

sudo = superuser do

Thanks - I think I tried that but still got the same error. Since I'm running the "Live" CD I don't know the password for root or the user account (Ubuntu) - it just boots right into the Ubuntu user account. In fact, if the screen saver comes on I can't get back in because I don't know the password. I tried all the usual suspects - Ubuntu, User, Default, Password etc. with various cases. Leaving it blank doesn't work either. I suppose I should probably read the readme at some point, huh?

Interestingly I found that in the ACPI folder there is another folder called Events. I went in thinking it might be logs that would show the output of the Wireless script, but instead it's a bunch of scripts for handling events. One is called IBM Wireless, and it contains a short script that detects when Fn+F5 is pressed, and then calls Wireless.sh. So it should work.

I pressed Fn+F5 several times, and magically somewhere around the 4th or 5th press the wireless LED went off! Cool! So I tried to turn it back on - pressed Fn+F5 about a dozen times, with no effect. So it works sometimes, it's just very flaky.

I'm thinking it may be related to running the Live version. I've got an extra 5K80 and it's supposed to rain all weekend. Maybe I'll throw that in and load the install version, see if it's more reliable. I've also got Fedora Core 3 and Suse burned to CDs, but I kinda wanted to to go with Ubuntu because of all the good press it's been getting. Any thoughts as to whether one of those would work better?

Ed Gibbs

Well, the fact that the radio is on is meaningless (except for the power drain) if there's no network that's using the radio. There's no way any other computer can connect to yours through the radio alone unless you actively turn on networking.

As for distributions, Ubuntu 5.04 and SuSE 9.2 are the best I've seen, and maybe 9.3 will be even better. I'm waiting for 9.3 to be freely available before trying it though. (I've also tried Linspire and Atheros and Mandrake; but not the high-commitment-level distributions like Gentoo.) SuSE 9.2 feels a bit slow and bloated compared to Ubuntu, though. Fedora has some enthusiastic supporters here, but to me it seems slow and clunky, and its hardware support is limited. You have to jump through hoops to get the Atheros wireless to work in my T42 with Fedora, and it's not clear if you can get hibernation etc. to work.

Hibernation, wireless, etc. all work out-of-the-box with Ubuntu and SuSE.

Ok - thanks.

Hey - I just noticed - I finally got a feather!

Ed Gibbs