T60 wifi: Radio disabled by HW RF Kill switch?

[Jarod Wilson]

Tom McLaughlin wrote:
> R. Luoma wrote, On 05/14/2009 01:28 PM:
>> I am still struggling with the T60 (using Ubuntu 9.04)
>>
>> By fiddling around with device file permissions, I finally got sound working,
>> by wifi stubbornly refuses to work.  For dmesg, I get the following:
>>
>> [   11.526091] iwl3945: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG/BG Network Connection driver for Linux, 1.2.26ks
>> [   11.526095] iwl3945: Copyright(c) 2003-2008 Intel Corporation
>> [   11.526211] iwl3945 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
>> [   11.526226] iwl3945 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
>> [   11.526266] iwl3945: Detected Intel Wireless WiFi Link 3945ABG
>> [   11.526457] iwl3945 0000:03:00.0: irq 2296 for MSI/MSI-X
>> [   11.580601] iwl3945: Tunable channels: 11 802.11bg, 13 802.11a channels
>> [   11.581503] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-3945-rs'
>> [   13.624090] iwl3945: Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On:
>> [   20.474760] iwl3945 0000:03:00.0: firmware: requesting iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode
>> [   20.525255] iwl3945: Radio disabled by HW RF Kill switch
>>
>> Needless to say, the Fn wifi button has no effect> and the BIOS
>> claims that the wifi is up and running.

As others have said, there's a physical hardware kill switch, which 
physically powers off the phy on the wireless card. The hardware rf kill 
switch is on the front left of the T60. Its got a bit of bright green 
inset in it, iirc.

  > My old R51 didn't do this but my new HP has a setting in the BIOS which
> will disable the WIFI if eth0 is up.  The hardware toggle has no effect. 
>   May be worth checking with the ethernet connection disconnected if you 
> haven't tried so already.

The T60 definitely doesn't have such a (IMO stupid) feature. :)

Just for the record... If you happen to be a Red Hat employee who has a 
company-purchased laptop... ~2 years ago, safe bet it was a T60. A year 
ago, it was a T61 (I have a T61, though I bought it myself). Nowadays 
its the T500 (new versioning scheme, but it looks just like the T60 and 
T61). So anyhow, its a pretty safe bet those models have been pretty 
well tested running Linux and work quite well -- including iwl3945 on a 
T60. :)

--jarod