Sunday, September 12, 2010

S10-3 - Unusual wifi problem

I am not sure when exactly it happened or why. I was playing around with the physical switch to turn the wireless off and using the Reliance broadband usb modem. It was frequently disconnecting and speed was low. It probably was a network issue. But I wanted to be sure that it was not a Lenovo netbook or OS problem.

Anyway, when I tried to use wifi, wireless indicator LED was off and connection failed no matter how hard I tried. The LED hasn't been on since.

The symptoms were similar to a problem reported in Ubuntu forum. However, in my case wl driver is used and not ath9k. I tried the same solution and a simpler variation worked.

Bluetooth capability of the netbook is not discovered at boot time. Wifi doesn't work. The wireless indicator LED remains off. However, on Ubuntu, MeeGo and Arch Linux, if the system is suspended and then restarted, Bluetooth device is recognised. But even more important, wifi just works. However, the LED remains off.

I went to the shop from where I bought it - no luck. They fiddled with hardware, reconnected some cables and symptoms remain the same. They wanted Windows to do anything more.

I thought I would at least email the problem to Lenovo support. No luck - the serial number of my system is rejected as being invalid. I hope it is because the sale is not yet in their system. Oh, well, will have to follow-up.

In the process, I found that a driver ideapad-acpi(ideapad-laptop) has been submitted to the mainline kernel. So, the functions for enabling/disabling wireless should work and that may clear up what is definitely a bios bug.

Meanwhile there is one advantage though - no unauthorised user can use of the wifi on my netbook :)

No comments:

Post a Comment