Hardware wireless switch + Linux (solved)

[sbastion]

My laptop features a wireless button to turn the built-in wireless card/antenna on/off. Unfortunately, this is defaulted to 'off' when the laptop is turned on. If I don't remember to turn on the wireless card before Linux boots up, I seem to be unable to configure the network settings for that interface within Linux after turning it on. "ifconfig ra0 on" returns no errors, but iwconfig sees no wireless networks. However, if I reboot the system, and turn on the wireless card before Linux boots, it works fine. This is just a small annoyance, forcing me to often turn on my laptop twice before being able to use it, and I was wondering if anyone else had run into a similar problem, and possibly found a fix for this?

Bastion

P.S. Averatec 3200 series laptop w/ ralink rt2500 wireless card, using manufacturer-provided driver source, compiled as module for kernel 2.6.8.1 vanilla.

[ReneeTeunissen]

Can you findout if your driver can turn it back on - if booted with windows? If that is the case, you one need to hack that driver and find you how it is done

EXCEPT IF IT IS ILLEGAL to reverse engineer drivers in your country... I cant judge about that and done want to get you in jail.
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Renee Teunissen - Embedded Software Developer - Linux - VxWorks - WinCE - OpenVMS - http://ReneeTeunissen.nl and http://www.pts.nl

[sbastion]

Yep, windows doesn't even notice it when I turn the wireless card on/off through the button, it just loses connectivity if I turn it off, and starts working again about 5 seconds after I turn it back on, with no user input required. However, it came to me to try and see if removing and reinserting the module into the kernel would work ... and it did! I'll just have to remove net.ra0 from startup, as well as remove the module from auto-loading, and make a script to load the module, and then '/etc/init.d/net.ra0 start'.

Thanks for the advice tho, but I have a feeling Windows just does a similar function, reloading parts of its driver every 5 seconds or so and thus is able to reconnect automatically as I turn the wireless back on.. just another way Microsoft found to waste my battery.

Bastion