PDA

View Full Version : [kubuntu] Dell Inspiron B120(etc) and the Wireless LED being used as a mail notifier.



frubblezuck
November 27th, 2009, 03:05 PM
I'm wondering...

I do not use wireless on this laptop. It either requires and external interface or mini-PCI card(which does not work due to a missing internal antenna) to use wireless.

I've recently downloaded kgmailcheck and set it up. There is a place for setting a command to activate an LED...can anyone think of a way to activate/deactivate this LED with command(dummy driver, on/off switch somewhere in /proc/sys/..., etc)?

I imagine some sort of dummy driver would have to be used...but I think it would be neat to be able to use this unused wireless active LED on the chassis...I'm not inclined to program, but I wouldn't mind trying to hack it up if I only knew where to start looking.

Just point me in a direction...thanks. I'm using Kubuntu 9.04.

Zorael
November 27th, 2009, 09:12 PM
Depends on the wireless card, I think.

Just browsing through /sys/bus/pci, I found the entry for my wireless card (netbook), which had a "leds" directory. (Divine the PCI address via lspci or 'lshw -c network'.)

zorael@lethe:/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.0/leds$ ls
iwl-phy0::assoc iwl-phy0::radio iwl-phy0::RX iwl-phy0::TX
Now, my wireless led only tells me that wireless is active, not whether I'm associated, receiving or transmitting, so I imagine it should have been the "radio" one, as it's basically a led for the killswitch.

Each those had a brightness file in them, to which I tried piping 0, but nothing happened. Perhaps it does for you?

zorael@lethe:/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.0/leds/iwl-phy0::radio$ ls
brightness device max_brightness power subsystem trigger uevent
zorael@lethe:/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.0/leds/iwl-phy0::radio$ cat max_brightness
255
zorael@lethe:/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.0/leds/iwl-phy0::radio$ echo 0 | sudo tee brightness
[sudo] password for zorael:
0
zorael@lethe:/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:02:00.0/leds/iwl-phy0::radio$
If it works, you'd have to create a script that toggles (or pulsates) the led, and tell sudoers that it should be able to be run with sudo without supplying a password.