hoffies blog

Today I finally got both iwlwifi (the free intel linux wireless drivers for the 3945 chipset) and s2ram (suspending to RAM) on my HP NX7400 notebook working. iwlwifi had always failed for me, stating the hardware rfkill switch was still on. Today I re-tried with ipw3945 (the binary drivers which had worked for me in the past) as someone at #ipw2100 irc channel suggested. And as it failed with the same message I began to worry whether the hardware was still OK. Then I remembered that there is an option for enabling/disabling WLAN in the BIOS setup. I checked and it was enabled, so it was not the cause of the problem. But there was another option which was WLAN-related: “LAN/WLAN switching”. Don’t ask me what that means, but it was enabled (so it can’t mean that kill switch as it should have worked while that option was enabled). I then switched that option to disabled and voila—it worked (well the device was called wlan0_rename which was not nice, but playing with udev rules a bit solved that).

The other thing I did was a BIOS update and I didn’t really do it with specific intentions. I had version F.08 before and upgraded to F.0B (HP is one of those companies which think it is funny to provide BIOS updates as .exe files; the best thing is: the .exe file is just a self-extracting binary (sadly `zip` doesn’t want to uncompress it); so if they had just used .zip or some other format for those files (including the ISO images) non-windows users would not be required to get to a Windows PC…). The update went smooth and I decided to try s2ram again. And wow—it worked! Previously I had the problem that the LCD backlight wasn’t switched on again on resume, but this works now. Either the BIOS update or the update to the recently released xf86-video-i810-2.1.0 driver (or both :p) had solved that. This only works for X btw, on a text-console the backlight still remains off. Maybe I should play with some options of s2ram, but I’m too lazy. ;)