solution to wifi / wake on Acer Aspire 5000 laptop.

[Ian Soutar]

Kubuntu Dapper on the Acer Aspire 5000 is remarkable. Ubuntu was the 
first distro to support the laptop acpi system for sleep, hibernate and 
wake.

However the wifi broadcom built in wifi has problems unless you ...

1/ Install the driver from the windows disk and use ndiswrapper to 
configure it.

2/ Go to the System Setting and then Laptop Power ... activate Button 
action "suspend" when closing the lid.

3/ Having installed the wifi it is necessary before the first connection 
to force the machine to sleep and wake by closing the lid and opening it 
and pressing the space bar.

4/ Once awake for the first time you will see the wifi light running on 
the front.

5/ If nothing happens you need to go to Network Settings and try 
activating the wireless. You may have to press the button on the front 
once to get it into the right mode.

After doing the above tweaks the wifi will work 100% as long as you do 
not boot the computer. Whenever it wakes up the wifi will work flawlessly.

Hopefully these details will help developers to "tweak" the sleep / wake 
system until the wifi works correctly all the time. For now I am 
delighted to have it work 100% after a few tweaks following a boot.

Ian Soutar