Enabling a wifi LED

[Scott Robbins]

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. 

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. 

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.  :)

> 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


-- 
Scott Robbins
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