My Dell E4300 has an Intel 5100 wifi card and the led blinks constantly. I still don’t understand how Intel can consider blinking the wifi LED during data transfer to be a sensible default. For most people it blinks non-stop which is both uninformative and irritating.

Fortunately blogger Alex Cabal found a solution for Karmic, and his updated solution also works for Natty/11.04. It describes opening a text editor and pasting a couple of lines, however I’m much lazier so here’s the one-line version:

echo 'options iwlcore led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf

Of course, the command above must be run as root (sudo -i), for some reason sudo gave me access denied. You also need to reboot… or you could just unload and reload the module:

modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn

The double ampersand just executes the next command if the previous one succeeded (exit status 0).

Update

As of Ubuntu 11.10 (kernel 3.0.0) the option has to be applied to the iwlagn module, options for iwlcore are ignored. Thus the full solution now becomes:

sudo -i
echo 'options iwlagn led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn