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#1 2009-07-28 03:31:11

drostin77
Member
Registered: 2009-07-15
Posts: 45

1000HE Wireless Management (Possible generic question)

I have installed arch and xmonad on my 1000HE and most stuff works (yay!).

However, recently wireless suddenly quit working, at the request of some google result I tried an ls /sys/class/net, and sure enough my interface (ra0) was gone.  After a painful hour of trying various things i hit fn-f2 by mistake, and it came back.  That is, the "wireless" key was working out of the box, and had disabled the wireless when i earlier pressed fn-f2 by mistake.  At first I was happy and wrote a little script to check for ra0 in ls /sys/class/net and put either [W] or [-] in my xmobar.  As I was happily mashing fn-f2 and watching my xmobar display the results I realized I wasnt really sure what an item being in /sys/class/net meant.

My concern, is that even when this fn-f2 key is pressed and wireless is off (or when i disable radio via wpriv ra0 radio_off), the wireless LED indicator light remains on.  I don't know what this means, but I want to be able to really turn off my wireless "card" (chip) to save power (and i use this thing on airplanes...).  I'm not sure if I should trust ls /sys/class/net as indicating that the chip is off, or if I should trust the LED (which I'm thinking may have a significantly lower level connection to the wireless chip, and thus if that LED is on I think the chip may be powered).  I would like to have a way to really turn off/on my chip, both for power saving and for airplanes.  I see 2 possibilities:

1 (seems more likely).  If the wireless LED is on, the wireless chip is powered, so my question: How can I actually turn on/off this chip to save power and be absolutely sure it is not transmitting data (ideally I'd override the current fn-f2 key with a script that does this, but thats more of an xmonad question)?

2.  Currently when ls /sys/class/net does not show ra0, the card really is off, and the LED is confused, in which case my question is:  How can I take control of the LED and make it reflect the reality of the situation

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