RFkill and RT2560F

Disabling RFkill hard block / RT2560F miniPCI on Toshiba Sattellite S1900-303

This 802.11b/g wlan card came originally from a D-Link DP-G321 Wireless print server. It felt a bit crappy from the start, the power brick broke once and eventually would not want to manage printers anymore (probably a firmware issue). Anyway, inside the print server was an Ralink RT2560F miniPCI wifi card. So I figured I could reuse it in an old Toshiba laptop. This laptop had a conventional miniPCI slot and an RF switch on the side, as WLAN was an optional accessory for this notebook at the time.

First trouble was finding the right Windows XP driver and getting it work. With some .inf driver modding the card worked with standard Ralink RT2500 drivers. However it was never possible to discover Wifi networks. After some frustration I booted a Sidux live-cd, to be confronted with "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Unknown error 132" when running the command "ifconfig wlan0 up".

To cut a long story short, rfkill will show you that a hardware block prevents the card from setting up properly:

> rfkill list

0: phy0: Wireless LAN

    Soft blocked: no

    Hard blocked: yes

On most laptops this would be fixed with a flick of the Wifi switch, but on this thing it wouldn't. When Toshiba designed this notebook they only had the Intel 2100b card in mind.

Searching the net learned that pin 13 of the miniPCI connector has been repurposed from an indication LED to an RF Silent switch. Some people mentioned covering this pin made their card ignore the bogus RFkill signal.

http://pinouts.ru/Slots/mini_pci_pinout.shtml

http://www.interfacebus.com/MiniPCI_Pinout_124Pin.html

http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/UserDocs/MiniPCI

http://free.okupaweb.com/punk/varios/gentoo-necversam300.html

http://members.datafast.net.au/dft0802/specs/mpci10.pdf

Thus, tape to the rescue. I used some Scotch MagicTape.

And now it even works with the built-in antennas (which are not very good but get the job done). I had to disconnect the auxiliary antenna however to get a stable signal.