wireless light on keyboard keeps blinking

[chili555]

I'll put it in my D620 and throw the 3945 on the junk pile.

Problem solved...

Really?? Rather than do any sort of troubleshooting or even putting a bit of tape or paint over the LED, you just give up and get an unknown quantity from Ebay? OK, good luck then.

[VinDSL]

Really?? Rather than do any sort of troubleshooting [...]

Here's the thing...

Last week -- Thanksgiving week -- I worked 32 hours on Wednesday. Went home Thursday afternoon, passed out for 8 hours, and worked another 24 hours on Friday.

Normally I would have ignored the blinking WiFi LED, but I spent all day Saturday, and all day Sunday troubleshooting the problem, while I was recuperating.

When I went to work Monday, and reflected on the situation, it occurred to me that my almost identical D620 had no such blinking problem.

Gotta admit, I never thought about putting duct tape on my business laptop -- covering it with fingernail polish, or whatever. LoL!

Good one...

[chili555]

I worked 32 hours on Wednesday.

Wow! You were busy!

[VinDSL]

Wow! You were busy!

Yeah, that's about it, for me. Might be somebody/somewhere that can be on their feet longer, but not me.

I suffered through another 32-hour day, a few years ago -- thought I did permanent damage to my feet -- they were 'lobster red'. LoL!

On my FleaBay purchases, I've been pretty lucky, so far. I try to stick with 'new' OEM overstock, whenever possible.

Kind of hard to pass-up genuine Dell parts, new in the bag/box, for pennies on the wholesale dollar. Don't know how the sellers make any money on this stuff -- buy something for a dollar, and sell it for two dollars I guess (100% profit). When you deal in tonnage, I suppose it makes a big difference.

Anyway, I did try all the usual tricks -- worked the search engines for two days, and tried everything I ran across.

Bottom line: Nothing I ran across gave me a solid LED light. That's what I was looking for. Everything I tried either continued to gave me a blinking LED or no LED at all.

[chili555]

May I assume you tried options iwlegacy led_mode=1?

[VinDSL]

May I assume you tried options iwlegacy led_mode=1?

Yes.

That was my fallback workaround -- the one I kept coming back to, when other 'solutions' failed.

As mentioned above, it extinguished the LED, but that wasn't what I was looking for. I want the LED to come on solid, when wifi is activated, and go dormant when wifi is switched off.

That's the way my Latitude D620 wifi LED always worked, on WinXP Pro, and all flavors of Linux.

Never experienced the 'problem' until I bought the Latitude ATG D630. The culprit turned out to be the Intel 3945 WLAN mini-card. The Dell 1390 mini-card displays no such bad behavior.

EDIT

BTW, in order to be crystal-clear, the Dell 1390 doesn't require ANY workarounds. As a matter of fact, the 'iwlegacy' trick does nothing for it, because the 1390 is rather featureless, and has no 'options' to control the LED through scripting, et cetera. It's basically dumb as a rock, but works like a champ.

[chili555]

BTW, in order to be crystal-clear, the Dell 1390 doesn't require ANY workarounds. As a matter of fact, the 'iwlegacy' trick does nothing for it,

I'm quite certain it doesn't work because I doubt it has an iwl-whatever card. I assume it has a Broadcom.

The other options for iwlegacy are 0 and 2. I'd try those as well, just for fun.

[VinDSL]

I assume it has a Broadcom.[...]

Correctamundo...

vindsl@Gorgar ~ $ lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net
09:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1673] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:01f9]
	Kernel driver in use: tg3
0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card [1028:0007]
	Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

vindsl@Gorgar ~ $ modinfo b43
filename:       /lib/modules/3.13.0-031300rc2-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/b43/b43.ko
firmware:       b43/ucode9.fw
firmware:       b43/ucode5.fw
firmware:       b43/ucode16_mimo.fw
firmware:       b43/ucode15.fw
firmware:       b43/ucode14.fw
firmware:       b43/ucode13.fw
firmware:       b43/ucode11.fw
license:        GPL
author:         Rafał Miłecki
author:         Gábor Stefanik
author:         Michael Buesch
author:         Stefano Brivio
author:         Martin Langer
description:    Broadcom B43 wireless driver
srcversion:     61503538419D225CDF80F48
alias:          bcma:m04BFid0812rev1Dcl*
alias:          bcma:m04BFid0812rev18cl*
alias:          bcma:m04BFid0812rev17cl*
alias:          bcma:m04BFid0812rev11cl*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev10*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev0F*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev0D*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev0C*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev0B*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev0A*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev09*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev07*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev06*
alias:          ssb:v4243id0812rev05*
depends:        bcma,ssb,mac80211,cfg80211
intree:         Y
vermagic:       3.13.0-031300rc2-generic SMP mod_unload modversions 
parm:           bad_frames_preempt:enable(1) / disable(0) Bad Frames Preemption (int)
parm:           fwpostfix:Postfix for the .fw files to load. (string)
parm:           hwpctl:Enable hardware-side power control (default off) (int)
parm:           nohwcrypt:Disable hardware encryption. (int)
parm:           hwtkip:Enable hardware tkip. (int)
parm:           qos:Enable QOS support (default on) (int)
parm:           btcoex:Enable Bluetooth coexistence (default on) (int)
parm:           verbose:Log message verbosity: 0=error, 1=warn, 2=info(default), 3=debug (int)
parm:           pio:Use PIO accesses by default: 0=DMA, 1=PIO (int)
parm:           allhwsupport:Enable support for all hardware (even it if overlaps with the brcmsmac driver) (int)

vindsl@Gorgar ~ $

[bacco2]

Confirm the approach
"lsmod | grep iwl"
worked for me on Ubuntu 14.04 on a old Dell Latitude D430.

Note: chance is there are more than one "iwl..." and you don't know which one is the right one, like in

iwl3945 63619 0
iwlegacy 88016 1 iwl3945
mac80211 546051 2 iwl3945,iwlegacy
cfg80211 409394 3 iwl3945,iwlegacy,mac80211

I tried both and one was the right one...