No auto-enable WiFi at boot

[Tom H]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:30 AM, David N. Lombard <dnl at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> I have an Acer Aspire One D150 running UNR 9.04.  All is well in
> general.  My problem is the radio is brought up at boot and a connection
> is always attempted.  I'd like to use the netbook on a plane, but I
> can't unless I can disable the radio.  There's no hardware radio switch.
>
> Ideally, I'd have a grub boot line that disabled the radio--sort of an
> "airline mode boot".  Barring that, I'll be happy disabling the
> auto-radio-init and a way to manually turn the radio on.  Any suggestions?

WiFi is not disallowed on planes. (I have used an airline-supplied
WiFi service.)

So if you do not want to have WiFi radio running, you can just run
sudo invoke-rc.d NetworkManager stop
when you are on a plane or before boarding.

If you REALLY want to use grub:

In Ubuntu, the default run level is 2 and 2-5 are equivalent. You
should be able to stop Network Manager from starting in run level 3
and passing a 3 at the end of a duplicate Jaunty kernel line in
menu.lst.

If I still had a Jaunty install, I would test it. On Karmic, Network
Manager has been converted to an upstart job and I have not yet looked
into how to control at which run level a job should launch, or even if
it is at all possible. But I can boot into run level 3, so there's
probably a way.

If you want to test the above with just one change, rename the Network
Manager symlink in /etc/rc3.d, reboot, and add a 3 to the end of your
grub kernel line "on the fly" once your boot menu comes up.