Need to be able to controll some devices from GUI - power management and device recovery

[janl]

* Case 1:
Problem description: Some wifi drivers/chipsets get confused after a while and will fall off the network and then fail to get on again with the normal network manager probings. A root shell and modprobe -rv ipw2200; modprobe ipw2200

References: Windows provides a "repair device" choice in the tray network icon which appears to remove and reinstall the driver

Suggested fix: A "repair network device" choice should be available through network manager

* Case 2:
Problem description: RFKILL switch kills wifi driver permanently.

Suggested fix: See above for workaround. A setting somewhere to automatically reinstall the wifi driver after unkill occurs would be nice.

* Case 3:
Problem description: USB devices keeps Laptops from reaching low power states for any significant time. My current laptop has a builtin 3G device and a builtin bluetooth device. Both are on a USB bus. According to powertop these rank among the top wake-up-causers on the system.

Suggested fix 1: powertop suggests "suspending usb". Not quite sure what this entails but unloading the USB stack seems one likely solution. A desktop device manager to do this would be nice.

Suggested fix 2: Powertop further suggests unloading the bluetooth and 3G device USB drivers. This normally requires root access and knowledge of the driver names. This is a less drastic way to realize almost the same goal as in fix1. A desktop widget is needed.

* Case 4:
... Once the desktop bus interface to manipulate the usb stack and wifi drivers is realized it's not all that strange to supply a "rfkill" software switch in the network manager applet that lets us do rfkill on the wifi and bluetooth but keep the 3G device going for example.

Regards,
  Nicolai

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.

Is this still an issue for you?

I do network manager -> disable, then enable which seems to work fine on 14.04/15.04.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubuntu-meta (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]