I was a bit disappointed last time when I disabled the Wifi under Windows XP and booted from Ubuntu Lucid. The wireless card wasn’t working anymore, with no apparent means to revive it. I had to boot back in Windows and let the magic do his work. I had to find a way to this under Linux without the need for a Microsoft OS and I did
First of all I read this link, which explains how it can be done, even if it’s not relevant to the nb200. Before getting ahead, downloading the source and all the stuff I decided to give it a try without changing anything. Please note that my kernel is Ubuntu stock one (presently 2.6.32-22). I strongly advise you to read everything before issuing commands and to try this only if you feel confident. It may also stop working on future kernel releases. You have to execute commands as root and this may potentially harm/break/destroy/set-on-fire your system. I will not be liable for damages or mishaps if you issue the commands outlined here. In doubt, don’t. Boot Windows XP and live free and fresh.
Simply loading the module( as root)
# modprobe omnibook
would bring me an almost empty /proc/omnibook, so useless for my present need (wifi).
I had to force the correct ectype, and I found a seemingly correct one here so I successfully loaded it.
# modprobe omnibook ectype=12
now /proc/omnibook is correctly populated
#ls
blank bluetooth display dmi lcd temperature throttling version wifi
#cat version
2.20090707-trunk
as you can see it’s the version shipped with the ubuntu stock kernel.
Finally:
# echo 0 >/proc/omnibook/wifi
to disable the wi-fi adapter
and
# echo 1 >/proc/omnibook/wifi
to enable the wi-fi adapter works for me.
Of course I don’t plan to use it often so I don’t think I will add it to the list of modules loaded at startup, but it may be interesting. It may also be interesting to see if disabling it under Linux and booting into XP keeps it disabled.
Thanks to Valroff from http://sourceforge.net/projects/omnibook/ and Dator from http://omke.sourceforge.net/ for giving us the control on the hardware we deserve as buyers. If I decide to get rid of my XP partition, I can do-so-if-I-so-wish now.
Of course I would be fun having a script with an hotkey rigged to it, so you can disable it with no problems, it should be doable using xev and gconf-editor, or looking for the doc on the brightness buttons.
In fact they work out-of-the-box in lucid on the nb200, so I could be interesting to see how they did it (without ominbook: I can confirm they were working before I loaded it. It was not loaded by default)