How to stop the blinking wifi LED on Ubuntu laptops with Intel wireless cards

November 11th, 2009 by Alex Cabal Leave a reply »

Apparently Intel, in all of their brilliance, have decided that people using Ubuntu (and Linux in general) on laptops with an Intel wireless card simply must know when data is being transferred over wireless. It is of such paramount importance that you know this that Intel has decided to alert you by constantly blinking the wifi LED whenever data is being transferred. I think every other wireless card on the planet just has a solid LED light to indicate the wireless is on (or off, using the physical switch), but no, that’s not good enough for Intel. (Can you guess that the blinking light really annoys me?)

There’s no easy-to-find setting to change the LED to solid. But there is a solution: create a little script to change the LED to solid whenever you connect to a new wireless network. It’s pretty easy to do, too. Here we go:

  1. Create a new file using Nano:
    user@computer:$ sudo nano /etc/network/if-up.d/wifi-led-noblink
  2. Paste the following into your new file using ctrl+shift+v:
    #!/bin/sh
    #this script will prevent the wifi light from blinking when on.
    #to activate this script, create a soft link to it in /etc/network/if-up.d/
    echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0::RX/trigger
    echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0::TX/trigger
    echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0::radio/trigger
    echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0::assoc/trigger

    Press ctrl+x to quit Nano, then y to save your script.

  3. Make the script executable:

    user@computer:$ sudo chmod u+x /etc/network/if-up.d/wifi-led-noblink

That’s it! Next time you connect to a network, your wifi LED should remain solid. This works in Karmic. And next time you find yourself cursing the guys at Intel, just remember: at least you don’t have a Broadcom wireless card!

2010-07-21 Update!

As of kernel 2.6.34 this solution no longer works for me. However, commenter DM has suggested an alternative that does seem to work again.

  1. Create a new file using Nano:
    user@computer:$ sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
  2. Paste the following into your new file using ctrl+shift+v:
    #1 means do not blink
    options iwlcore led_mode=1

    Press ctrl+x to quit Nano, then y to save your script.

  3. Restart your laptop.

This different solution should work if the above solution doesn’t.

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14 comments

  1. Cesar says:

    Thank you! This worked like a charm in a Hp nx7300 laptop.

  2. michael says:

    Worked great for my 8530w. Other “solutions” didn’t, but yours did. Man, that was annoying! Thank you!

  3. bbrujulo says:

    Thanks a lot!! Woow… The blinking led was driving me crazy :D .

  4. Jorge L says:

    Thanks a lot.
    Great solution for a annoying problem.

  5. Patrick says:

    Thank you so much! Worked like a bomb on my HP 8710w, was really driving me nuts!

  6. Emily says:

    Thanks a lot!! Woow… The blinking led was driving me crazy :D .

  7. Brandon says:

    Thanks, mate.
    Worked great on my inspiron under Lucid.

  8. Avinash says:

    thanks a lot mate. it worked great on my HP g60. It was quite annoying.

  9. J says:

    Great solution. worked right away on my HP dv3 running ubuntu 10.04. Thx!

  10. alpha0 says:

    works great on compaq presario a900. using ubuntu 10.04

  11. dm says:

    My solution is to add the following in /etc/modprobe.d/99-local.conf (it’s opensuse 11.3; for other distributions, I think it is /etc/modprobe.d/options):

    options iwlcore led_mode=1

    For more info: modinfo iwlcore

    • Alex Cabal says:

      Thanks DM, that also seems to work. The file to put it in for Ubuntu is /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
      (options.conf works too, it doesn’t matter).

  12. shing says:

    Using a Dell E4200 with an Intel 5100 wifi card. This killed wifi till I rm’d the wlan.conf file.

  13. shing says:

    I suppose I should add I’m using lucid.

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