Comment 175 for bug 193970

Revision history for this message
Thespian (jesse-mundis) wrote :

Adding to the data for this bug.

It still shows up on Hardy 8.04 kernel: 2.6.24-24-generic
fully patched.

on a Compaq 8710p laptop with iwl4965

I _don't_ have the backport package installed.

 " dpkg --list | grep backport" yields nothing.

Symptoms and description are as others have reported. The "hard" switch on this laptop is along a touch-bar above the function keys. In Windows XP, it lights up when on, and goes out when off, and correctly toggles the wifi/bluetooth. In Ubuntu, once wifi is turned off via the switch, nothing seems to wake the wifi back up. Even after a reboot, the wifi antenna remains offline.

/var/log/messages just shows:

Jun 28 18:02:47 laptop kernel: [ 136.685170] iwl4965: Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On:
Jun 28 18:02:47 laptop kernel: [ 136.685173] Kill switch must be turned off for wireless networking to work.

but pushing the touch bar switch doesn't help without the modprobe fix described.

I've been able to boot into XP (as a previous poster described) and use the "HP wireless assistant" pop-up to fix it, and after finding this thread, I have a work-around in ubuntu:

hit the wireless button, then do
 sudo modprobe -r iwl4965
 sudo modprobe iwl4965

But it would be nice to have this fix propagated to Hardy 8.04. I'd rather not have to upgrade distros just to get this fix. Any chance this can get into the next release for Hardy, or if someone could point me to a patch I could manually apply just for this? Reading through the comments above, I'm not entirely clear that I understand the root cause of the problem, or the nature of the fix in Jaunty. There is some mention of "hal" as well as a few other components. A clear pointer to the problem and the fix would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, and please let me know if there is other information I can provide about my hardware that would be of use.