i think the wlan card built into my panasonic let’s note (= toughbook) laptop might be faulty, but until i got enough time to run some diagnosis tests, i’d like to deactive it and use an external one.
could anyone tell me how to do that on opensuse 11.2 / kde 4.4?
thanks a bunch!
You may have to blacklist the onboard device, I guess. I never actually needed to do this before.
caf4926,
thanks for the quick reply. well, i plugged in a different external wlan card, which fortunately is recognized immediately, so i got 2 cards activated now, one of which is running (eth1 is the build-in one, probably faulty; eth2 is the external one, works fine).
since eth1 isn’t currently working, i’m not really faced with that problem, but what would happen if i got two wlan running? would web-related applications choose automatically one or the other, or would i risk some sort of system ragnarök?
how do you blacklist a wlan card? i’ve gone into yast2 > network devices > network settings, switched the interface from network manager to ifup, and selected “will not be started at all” for eth1, but it’s apparently still active.
i suppose i could switch eth1 off from inside the bios, though.
Blacklisting basically stops the kernel loading the driver module that is part of the kernel.
Kernel module configuration - openSUSE
But i shouldn’t see it being any different than say me now, I have wirless switched on on my laptop, but my eth cable connected. So Network Manager automatically switches over to eth0 as preference to wlan
And in any case, I can also just click NM and switch to wlan, even with the eth0 connected. Although it tends to switch back to eth0
I see, thanks.
I think I’ll leave both cards activated, would like to observe what is happening to eth1 (I suspect it’s defective but am not sure yet.)
homoludens1000 wrote:
> I see, thanks.
>
> I think I’ll leave both cards activated, would like to observe what is
> happening to eth1 (I suspect it’s defective but am not sure yet.)
I’ve got an HP dv6000 here that also has a bum wireless but leaving it
active cuts battery life significantly. It may actually be good, but the
mechanical switch feels flaky so it could be a bad switch - either way,
blacklisting the driver gives a noticeable increase in battery life. Of
course, opening the panel and pulling the wlan card helps even more 
but
I have to ship the thing back to my brother so for now it’s running w/o the
drivers installed. The power drain is tolerable so I’m guessing that the
driver see the interface and turns the card on but doesn’t turn it off when
it decides the card isn’t responding - or it responds to the tests and just
won’t function. Yes, the card is dead for all intents and purposes even if
HAL does see it - won’t answer to any commands.
–
Will Honea
Will, thanks for the comment, yeah, that’s true, two WLAN cards will consume significantly more battery power.
As it happened, my internal WLAN card recovered for a little while yesterday, so I did have to running WLAN connections at the same time. No system meltdown, but the internet connection was very, very slow, so it’s probably not a good thing to have two conflicting network connections activated at the same time. Things went back to normal speed once I deactivated eth1 (went into BIOS and switched it off.
Cheers