[ltp] T61 Atheros wireless LED

[Micha]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:25:53 +0100
Daniel Castro <castromd@tcd.ie> wrote:

> Tim,
> 
> My T61 has an Atheros and it works fairly well.
> Now that I upgraded to 8.04 it works even better. It does have some 
> minor issues like:
> - The signal reception is weak. For example if in Windows it reports 90% 
> strength in Ubuntu it will report something like 65-70%.
> - Some WPA encryptions will not work under Network Manager. But that's 
> fixable but not connecting through NM but rather creating your own 
> wpa_supplicant script and running it.
> - The led won't work. I'm used now and don't really care, I have visual 
> software indicators on my screen anyway...
> 
> But in terms of bandwidth and reliability it's fine... so I wonder if 
> you have a different Atheros than me.
> My lspci shows:
> 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 
> 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
> 

I have the same card, I got the led to work by issuing
sysctl dev.wifi0.ledpin=1
sysctl dev.wifi0.softled=3
(the second line seems to be needed but afterwords I can reset it to any odd
value I want including the default value 1)

I have a different question though. It seems that on my machine the hardware
switch is not connected to the wireless antena, only the bluetooth antena
(wireless keeps working event with the hardware switch set to off).

Do you have the same behaviour or did they forgot the connect the switch
properly on my machine?

Thanks

> ________________________
> 
> Daniel Castro
> Networking and Distributed Systems
> Computer Science
> Trinity College Dublin
> 
> Mobile: 083-318-2058
> 86.4.3 Trinity Hall, Dartry Road, Dublin 6
> ________________________
> 
> 
> 
> Robert T. West ("Tim") wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
> > <hmh@hmh.eng.br> wrote:
> >   
> >> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Micha wrote:
> >>     
> >>> There is also a ath5k driver both in the kernel and compatwireless but
> >>> although it recognises my card it fails to actually communicate. I've
> >>> been told not long ago on this list that it's because the card is pci-e
> >>> and there is an issue with the interrupts at the moment.
> >>>       
> >> I have seen a patch for that already in the linux-wireless ML, it just
> >> disables MSI for now on all ath5k and ath9k cards, and that's enough to fix
> >> the interrupt issues.  Which doesn't mean everything will work, but at
> >> least it will have a non-zero chance to :-)
> >>
> >> It might even be on the newest wireless-compat already, but you can look at
> >> the linux-wireless archives for ath5k: emails and check.
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > That's of great interest. I haven't had much luck running Ubuntu Hardy
> > on a T60p. Currently using ndiswrapper (probably because I don't know
> > better) to get the Atheros pci-e wireless to work at all, and, as of
> > my last bout with it, it works with no encryption or WEP, but will
> > only handshake with WPA if it's within a few feet of the router, and
> > never reliably. I find that... strange.
> >