Ubuntu On Sony Vaio FW Series

I have wrote about turning off bluetooth and simple shell scripts to do it. Because we have a single switch for wifi and bluetooth, I have wrote a simple gnome panel applet to switch bluetooth off and on when I need it, just in one click.

When bluetooth is turned off the icon is gray, when you click on it, it switches to color and turn on bluetooth, click again to turn off.

If peopele need it, I can package and write a little howto about installing it

I have found problem with ath9k driver for my wifi card. When bluetooth enabled I get random disconnects from AP and after some disconnects it loses AP completely and can not get ip again. If I disable bluetooth in Linux or in Windows wifi works almost ok, sometime it looses AP too and I need to reboot.

I guess you notice that on FW series laptop we have only one wireless switch for bluetooth and wifi both. You can’t just disable bluetooth by switching it on case.

Another problem is if you disable bluetooth in Windows, you can’t then enable it in Linux. I’ve enabled it in Windows then rebooted into Ubuntu and wrote two shell scripts to enable/disable bluetooth in runtime. All you should do is open your text editor (gedit maybe) and make two files named bluetooth-off and bluetooth-on then put this lines into files.

For bluetooth-off:
#!/bin/bash
sudo hciconfig hci0 down
sudo modprobe -r hci_usb


And for bluetooth-on:
#!/bin/bash
sudo modprobe hci_usb


Save this files on your desktop, or somewhere you can find it quick. Open your terminal and go where you saved files (e.g. cd ~/Desktop/). You must give this files execution permission to run it. Using this commands chmod +x bluetooth-off and the same for bluetooth-on. Or right click on file select Permissions tab and select Allow executing file as program.

Ok, that’s it, now double click on bluetooth-off/on file, select Run in terminal and you should get a terminal window asking your password, enter it and bluetooth will turn off/on.

UPD: If I’m constantly ping any server or my router it helps to hold connection too. That’s strange, but it works.

UPD2: If I lost connectio to AP and can get IP again, I can just disable wireless and enable it again from right click menu on network applet in tray. If it does not help, just do it again, it help almost time.