How to set the wifi-button enabled by default?

[molnarp]

Hi,

I have an Acer Travelmate 4000 with a software RF kill switch (the wi-fi button) and I am using Linux Mint 5. Wifi and the wifi button worked out-of-the-box, but there is a problem I can't solve.
After the boot up the wifi button is inactive, so I have to press it to enable the wifi. After that I have to open the network manager and make it connect to my preferred network manually.

If I press the wifi button during the boot up then it connects automaticaly.

The question: how to set the wifi button active, that I do not have to press it during boot up?

Thanks
Peter

[waterhead]

This may be something that you can change by entering the system BIOS at boot.

[molnarp]

Thank you, Paul, but I think this is not BIOS-related. If I start Win XP instead of Linux the wifi button is active and the computer connects to the network without any further action. So I think this is not the BIOS but some configuration issue.

Any other idea?

[waterhead]

If this were a different distribution, like Fedora, I could tell you exactly where to go to configure to start at boot. I have yet to find a similar configuration page on Ubuntu/Mint.

There is another problem with doing this. If you have a WPA encrypted connection, it will hang if it tries to connect at boot. It needs a password to connect, and it can't give it because of security. You could just consider this a security feature, and leave it at that. it is a minor irritation, no worse than having to constantly enter "sudo"

There may be one way. First we must find where it is keeping the file that reports the wireless state. On my Mint install, I could find the wireless on/off state with this command.

cat /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state

The output should be either 0 or 1:
0 = off
1 = on

You should be able to change the state with this command:

echo 0 > /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state

This command would tun it off. I believe that you then have to reload the module after changing the state.

If this works, you should be able to put the command into a shell script, and have it run at login.

Seems like a lot of trouble when you can just do it with a couple of key presses. But that is why we use Linux, so that we can tinker.