[arch-general] Ways to power on broadcom bcm4311 wireless adaptor without booting into windows

[mercator]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:37:22 +0530, Jayesh Badwaik wrote:

>
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Moncef Baazet <mob.ajm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > At Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:35:26 +0800,
> > mercator wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi guys,
> >>
> >> After switching from Linux Mint to Archlinux, my wireless card refused
> to
> >> show up in lspci. It DOES worked fine under Linux Mint, but .... Below
> is
> >> my output of 'lspci -vnn |grep Broadcom' :
> >>
> >> 10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M
> Gigabit
> >> Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
> >>
> >>
> >> My laptop is hp 6515b, with a touch panel for the toggle of wifi on/off
> >> etc. After a search in google I found the problem may be that the power
> of
> >> wifi has been shut down, and solution is to boot into windows and turn
> wifi
> >> on, because the touch panel will not work under Linux (as far as I
> know),
> >>
> > n> And the I found a software named rfkill, hoping it will work. 'rfkill
> list'
> >> out put as follows :
> >>
> >> 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
> >> ? ? ? ? Soft blocked: yes
> >> ? ? ? ? Hard blocked: yes
> >>
> >> After 'rfkill unblock all', I get:
> >>
> >> 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
> >> ? ? ? ? Soft blocked: no
> >> ? ? ? ? Hard blocked: yes
> >>
> >> And still no wireless card detected. So my question is, is there any
> way to
> >> power the wifi on without booting into windows? (in fact, windows has
> >> diappeared from my laptop for 3 years, and there is no partition on my
> >> harddisk supporting windows install).
> > Hi,
> > I don't know if this is gonna help, but when I first installed Arch
> > I had the same problem. What solved it was bringing my wireless
> > interface up manually after activating the wifi switch.
> >
> > So check out your `ifconfig` output. If you don't see your wireless
> > interface bring it up. `ifconfig wlan0 up`, or whatever your wireless
> > interface name is.
>
> Hi,
>
> Is not ifconfig deprecated now? It is probably not present on the
> OP's pc. There should be an equivalent command in the replacement.
> You would probably have to use the following command. I am not sure
> about the correctness, so please refer to the link.
>
> ip link set wlan0 up
>
> More information can be found at http://linux.die.net/man/8/ip
>
>
> Hi Moncef and Jayesh,

Thank you for your advice. I've tried both 'ifconfig' and 'ip link set',
with 'wlan0' and 'eth1', and both said 'no such device'. So I think it's
still a wifi power switch thing.


On Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:25:03 +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:

> I had a similar problem with another HP laptop. I was able to switch
> on the wifi by pressing the wifi switch when I was in BIOS, but YMMV.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom
>

And thank you Tom. I tried pressing my wifi switch when in BIOS. But it is
in a touch panel, so I cannot switch it on manually. And I wonder whether
your wifi switch is in a touch panel or a seperate button? Thanks!