Public bug reported:
This is basically a hardware/bios autoconfig problem.
So, I have this Compal CL56 laptop, and it has a standard Intel Centrino
chipset, so the wifi is nicely supported by the ipw2200 driver.
Unfortunately, like (I'm led to believe) a number of laptops, the BIOS
has this totally psychotic feature that I can only conclude was invented
by a crackheaded monkey: By default, when the machine boots up, the BIOS
/software disables/ the wifi, and won't enable it again without some
crazy BIOS hack. This is particularly insane, as the machine actually
has a physical switch on the side to turn it off, if you actually wanted
to disable it.
Anyway, the result here is that to get wifi working in Ubuntu, you need
to load the acerhk kernel module with the following options and poke a
bit, like so (I found this by googling):
modprobe acerhk usedritek=1 autowlan=1 force_series=290
echo 1 > /proc/driver/acerhk/wirelessled
This basically sucks, since obviously any ordinary user is not going to
know to do this. It would be really nice if:
1. The acerhk module could autodetect this BS, so just loading it is sufficient
(without some crazy options).
2. Ubuntu auto-detects that it needs this module.
3. There was something to poke that LED bit. Either always, or perhaps some
support in the network code to actually use this software-lockout (which might
be nice on some laptop without a hardware switch, I suppose).
I don't know what other laptops this idiocy is needed on, but I'd be
happy to test out any patches to fix this.
** Affects: linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22 (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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Wifi doesn't work on Compal CL56 without crazy acerhk hack
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/162120
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