[NC10] [Karmic] Wifi Power management

[sserdyuk]

Hi,

I am tuning my NC10 netbook for maximum battery life and one thing I've noticed missing is power management in ath5k drivers. In other words 'iwconfig wlan0 power on' fails to activate power-saving features. Is that by any chance a limitation of standard Karmic drivers? Has anybody figured out the solution?

I am thinking about trying to compile compat-wireless drivers http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k) but I do not know how to revert to standard drivers if compat drivers make no difference. Can someone maybe tell me how to test new drivers without installing them permanently?

Thank you!

[voria]

As far as I know, the ath5k driver does not support power management, but it supports rfkill function. You can kill the radio when wireless is not needed and save battery life with this command:

Code: Select all

iwconfig wlan0 txpower off

[cywhale]

Hello,
somwhere I read about ath5k getting powersaving support with kernel 2.6.33 - but I do not know if this is still in the works. Replaced the wifi card with a Intel 5100agn which can be forced to enable powersaving mode using self-compiled driver (more recent than in karmic).

[sserdyuk]

Thank you! Appreciate your responses.