Dirk-Jan’s blog

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 ath5k driver for the wireless card is being correctly initialised, as you can see:

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’.

There are several ways to find out which release of Ubuntu you’re using. But the most easy way is to make use of the lsb_release (LSB stands for Linux Standard Base) command which pulls it’s info from ‘/etc/lsb-release’. This is a command line utility, so you’ll need to open a Terminal in which you can enter the commands. You can use the -a switch to see all information, as the example below shows. The -h switch will display a list of all possible options.

The lsb_release command does not show what architecture version you’re using. To find this out, you can use the uname command. The next example will show a 64-bit architecture.

The find you wich kernel release you’re currently using you can issue a uname -r. Use the -a switch if you want all information from the uname command displayed at once.

See ‘man uname’ for more details on using the uname.