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Asus Eee PC 900 Easy Peasy Wifi Toggle Hack

Due to various work related reasons I ended up in need of an ultra portable computing platform that could run Linux. After much hem-hawing I decided on the Asus Eee PC 900A which retailed for $250 at my local Target. It comes with a cuszomized version of Xandros Linux which is Debian based (YAY!) but didn’t allow me to run an iptables based firewall or easily get a working copy of Truecrypt installed for my sensitive data (BOO!). Enter Easy Peasy!

Easy Peasy is an ubuntu based distro that is cuztomized to work on this super tiny laptop. Pretty much everything works out of the box EXCEPT for the wifi power on/off hotkey (Fn+F2.) After a few hours of research I discovered a small trail of problems with this issue but managed to fix it by doing the following:

Add or verify that the following lines are enabled in /etc/modprobe/options:

# disable rf on load
options rfkill default_state=0
# pciehp crap
options pciehp pciehp_force=1

Modify the /etc/acpi/eeepc-wifi-toggle.sh to reflect ths:

#!/bin/bash

state_file=/sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state
state=`cat $state_file`

if [ $state -eq 1 ] ; then
  echo 0 > $state_file
else
  rmmod pciehp
  modprobe pciehp
  echo 1 > $state_file
fi

I should say that this is a workaround for a variety of contributing issues but it works for me and I’ll gladly let the maintainer override these edits with a true patch when one comes out For those interested I’m running the following kernel:

root@jbean:~# uname -a
Linux jbean 2.6.27-8-eeepc #1 SMP Sun Nov 16 12:02:12 MST 2008 i686 GNU/Linux