MSI Wind U135DX – Ubuntu 10.10 – Wireless and shutdown issue fix

Installing Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) on a MSI Wind U135DX has been nearly straight-forward. Remember that the hot-key to turn WiFi on and off works at a BIOS level, so it doesn’t matter what operating system is running. Or not.
The only snag I’ve found so far is related to turning the “netbook” off. I found this page which helped a lot.
The author there writes:

Blacklist the old drivers used for the 3090 wireless chip.

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

add the following at the bottom

blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2800lib
blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00lib

He then goes on to manually install the correct driver. I found it was only necessary to blacklist the drivers. The current linux kernel is 2.6.35-27-generic.
Although the WiFi adapter is a RT3090, the RT2860 driver seems to work with it. I’m not sure if it works with a WPA2 wireless network, I’m using WPA-PSK for various backward compatibility reasons.

Tags: howto, ubuntu