So yesterday I got a Lenovo IdeaPad S10, it was really nice, the only bad thing was that it didn’t have WiFI.
I (and Albert, thank you 🙂 tried everything I found. echo’ing > /sys files, rfkill tool, looking for hidden buttons, nothing seemed to fix it. -.-
Just in case anybody comes across this one again, just install Windows, install Lenovo Power Management drivers, press Fn+F5 and press On on the WiFI and Bluetooth, then you can come back to the freedom :P.
It’s too bad that this stuff keeps happening…
On my Thinkpad R50e I had to set “Headphone Jack Sense” to mute (==off?) in alsamixer to make the internal speaker work. Regardless of that, plugging something into the headphone jack mutes the built-in speaker as it should be. Looks like there is some facility for that in the laptop’s Intel chipset that not all hardware uses.
The bottom line is that ready-made PCs are often quirky and only software (like Windows drivers) made for the specific model uses that hardware correctly. We already know that unfortunate fact.
Maybe you can help somebody fix rfkill on your model. It might use ACPI for example, and people like Matthew Garret, who blogs about ACPI and quirky hardware, try to make such things work on Linux. There are tricks like running the OS that works with the hardware in a VM connected to the real hardware via some kind of passthrough and logging I/O operations to infer what a driver has to do.
Don’t buy Leveno could be another solution before one runs into the problem : ) Thanks for the info!
Isn’t there the option to activate WiFi in its bios?
Another hint: the latest 2.6.36 kernel contains an ideapad ACPI driver (called “ideapad-laptop” and subject to further changes in the following versions), that should make it no longer necessary to install Windoze.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ikepanhc/ideapad-laptop.git;a=summary