On Wednesday 14 January 2009 16:32:53 Scott Robbins wrote:
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 04:03:19PM +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
On http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Acer_Aspire_One it is said that the wifi LED can be activated by adding these two lines to /etc/sysctl.conf:
dev.wifi0.ledpin = 3
That was for the 2.6.26.x kernel. It no longer works with 2.6.27 kernel.
and it goes on to say that this works with both F9 and F10.
If you're using the ath5k driver included with the kernel, you won't be able to get those values in the 2.6.27 kernel. Whether MadWifi's drivers add the sysctl variables, I'm not sure, I would have to check.
You'll get an error that there's no such sysctl option. It seems to not be in the 2.6.27 vanilla kernel either.
OK, thanks.
On the other hand, we got ath5k in that kernel, so it was a more than even tradeoff IMHO
In Ubuntu's 2.6.28 kernel, it seems to be back. A quick try on Fedora's rawhide, however, indicates that Fedora doesn't have it.
However, Ubuntu pulled ath5k support out of their kernels--I'd much rather they had left that in, though it's easy enough to fix with backports. If I have to choose one or the other, I'd rather have the module right there.
Although some people mentioned that they got better results with MadWifi than the ath5k module, I haven't found that to be the case.
That may be hardware dependent, of course. I do have one, fairly serious issue, but at this stage I'm suspecting that it's hardware, not driver. I'll do a bug report if it warrants it, but right now I'm still collecting information/evidence.
FWIW, getting that working just gives an annoying amber flashing during wireless activity. I quickly turned it off, though of course, some people like flashing lights. :)
I don't like flashing lights, but I do like to know that wifi is activated - there's that toggle switch that gives you no other indication of its status.
However, it's not clear whether it only works with the madwifi driver.
As mentioned above, that I don't know--I would have to test that and see, but I do know that if you use the ath5k driver, the sysctl values aren't there.
However, I need to be sure that I'm not going to do any harm by trying this.
I'm not sure what happens if an unknown variable is in sysctl.conf. I usually did it on the fly with
sysctl -w dev.wifi0.ledpin=3 sysctl -w dev.wifi0.softled=1
Thanks, everyone for the answers. Not what I wanted to hear, but I'd rather have it 'from the horse's mouth' :-)
Anne