Wireless fix on Amilo running Ubuntu
Recently I had to use a laptop for a course I was doing. This Fujisu Siemens Amilo Li 2727 laptop came with Windows Vista pre-installed. Since the installed OS didn’t matter for the course I installed the latest Ubuntu which is 9.04 (Jaunty). All worked well except for the wireless card (Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 04)). The network applet says “Wireless is disabled”. The ath5k driver for the wireless card is being correctly initialised, as you can see:
[ 12.170274] ath5k_pci 0000:08:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 12.170439] ath5k_pci 0000:08:00.0: registered as ‘phy0′
[ 12.355693] ath5k phy0: Atheros AR2425 chip found (MAC: 0xe2, PHY: 0×70)
[ 264.864848] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2442MHz)
You can also use the following command to see if the device is blocked (not tuned on!):
0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
It appears that the wireless card is enabled but not activated, so you’ll need to turn it on. Using Windows you use the Fn-F1 key combination to activate the wireless card, but this doesn’t work with Linux. The easiest way to get wireless going is by activating a kernel module called acer_wmi. As soon as you execute the following line you’ll notice the wireless led will light up. There are other ways, but this is by far the most easy and elegant way to do it.
The wireless card is now active! Wait a moment and you’ll see wireless networks appear in the NetworkManager if you’re in range. Just for the record I am using Ubuntu kernel 2.6.28-11-generic at the moment of writing.
To make this solution last on a reboot, you’ll have to add the module name ‘acer_wmi’ to ‘/etc/modules’.
30 Apr 2010: I can confirm this work-around also works for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid).
Today I have installed the new release of Ubuntu 9.10 codename Karmic Koala on my laptop and it appears that the wireless device is still not activated by default. I had to carry out the above steps to activate it again.
Just done this on my son’s Amilo 2727. Worked a treat. Thanks.
Hi! thanks for the tip! I have tried this on my LI 2732, and the WLaN turns on okay but still no wireless network,
Have you got any tips for how to make it work?
Hi Niklas, I’ve only tested it against the Amilo 2727, so I’m unsure if it works for other models as well. You could check if there is a wlan interface when the wlan indicator turns on and have a look at the output of the dmesg command.
hi, just tried this (amilo 2727 here) and when i try to do the bit to save it to /ect/modules it says it’s denied. help please D=
You’ll need to be Root to add the module to ‘/etc/modules’…
Works fine on my Amilo 2727 but the Driver seems to “crash” when I use WLAN for more than 2 hours - it doesn’t find any WLAN-Hotspot then.
A reboot does the trick… :-/
@Mclovin
I have corrected the way how to add the module to the /etc/modules file.
@Niklas
I’ve just installed Ubuntu 10.04 on Li 2732. The wireless still doesn’t work by default, but I came across these commands which worked. I can finally use my wireless on Linux. No thanks to the so-called Fujitsu-Siemens support team. Can anyone confirm if they really do exist, I’m curious.
I haven’t tried the commands on Fedora though.
modprobe -r ath5k
modprobe acer_wmi
modprobe ath5k
Dank voor deze tip, maar één opmerking: met het “tee”-commando wis je de complete *bestaande* inhoud van /etc/modules. Dat lijkt me een ongewenst neveneffect.
Het lijkt me dus beter om acer_wmi toe te voegen aan /etc/modules met Gedit, dus gksudo gedit /etc/modules en dan acer_wmi toevoegen.