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Hello. This is a continuation of the Debian bug #586383 ( http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=586383 ) filed long ago. As a test run I booted into my system with the latest Linux 3.5.2 kernel. Upon booting, the network activity light is orange only. After selecting the 3.5.2 kernel, while loading, the light remained orange. I think the first moment I noticed that it turned blue was when the udev daemon loaded (this was from looking at what the screen said when the system was loading at the moment I noticed the colour change). After this, I noticed minor flickering and then the light was completely orange again. When gdm3 (the GNOME display manager) started, the light became blue again and stayed blue for a while. Right after logging in, the light turned orange again but perhaps it’s because I wasn’t connected to the Internet. Once I connected to my network, the light flickered at a faster, medium pace and occasionally stayed blue for a long-ish while (many minutes). I think the pattern is that when the data transfers through the wireless card (such as by going to the internet), it activates the flicker when the colour is blue for a long time and if it’s already flickering then, it increases the rate of the flickering.
This issue was present for a long time. I remember having it since Debian 5.0 Lenny (with the 2.6.32 kernel) but I’m not sure if that’s when the issue was introduced since, if I recall correctly, I didn’t have this hardware before then. It probably was the first kernel which supported this wireless card since I had upgraded the kernel just for the wireless network and I vaguely remember something of the sort being the case so the issue may have been there from the start of the ath5k driver’s integration to the kernel.
This is my wireless card (which is inside the HP G50 laptop) from lscpi: 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) |