Need a default to leave RF turned off on reboot

[kimquirk]

70x series (8.1.x) and joyrides up to 2301.

If you turn off the radio (RF) through sugar-control-panel or through the new GUI control panel, after a reboot it turns back on.

In many deployments today where there are many hundreds of laptops, there may be no good way to use collaboration and the work-around is for all XOs to turn off their radio and turn them on only in small groups when they want to share a project or connect to the internet.

For this work around to be effective, we need a default value that can be set in the control panel, radio off by default. When the laptops boots, it ensures that the radio is off again. NOTE: I'm not asking that the radio never turn on; if it comes on/off during boot driven by OFW, that's ok. Once the laptop has booted up, if the 'default radio off' is true, then the radio should be turned off.

I tagged this bug with 'blocks?' to get an analysis of what is needed so we can make a decision on its blocking -- not because it blocks the 8.2.0 release. It is extremely important for some country deployments (Rwanda, Haiti, and Birmingham today) so we need a solution... but we can decide on the release after we get info about the work effort and its complexity.

[cjb]

Kim, would having the "extreme power management" (which currently just turns off the radio) be persistent across reboots be a good solution? That would be something I could do easily, but it's in Power rather than Network.

[kimquirk]

I think that would be good...can we give it a try?

[marco]

Reassigning to cjb then. Please give it back to me if that doesn't work out as expected. Thanks!

[cjb]

Tagging as a bug I'm working on for 8.2.i

[thomaswamm]

I noticed today while testing beta build 8.2-759 that I was surfing Trac, even though I had Extreme Power Management checkmarked on. I suppose the radio was switched on after an X-server/Sugar crash/autorestart that happened during my testing. I thought radio coming back on was a bug, but now see it as a fuzzy sort of feature.

[cjb]

This is done now, on its way to Joyride as ohm-0_1_1-6_19_20080910git_olpc3.

[cjb]

Bah, found a bug. Fixed in ohm-0_1_1-6_20_20080911git_olpc3.

[cjb]

Tested in joyride-2415; please pull ohm-0_1_1-6_20_20080911git_olpc3 over to 8.2.

[cscott]

ohm-0_1_1-6_20_20080911git_olpc3 added to stable repo: http://mock.laptop.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=repos;a=commitdiff;h=d11b42529c97a1c9030b51a20ca9d1e5931eb79b

Should appear in 8.2-760 and later. Please test.

[mchua]

Thanks to cjb for the clarifications that helped me write this one up.

|Test case|

On an XO running 8.2-760 or later...

1. Open the sugar control panel GUI (hover over XO-person in Home view, click control panel drop down)
2. Click the Power icon
3. Check the "extreme power management" checkbox
4. Reboot
5. Open the sugar control panel, click the power icon, and see if the checkbox is still on - it should be
6. Double-check: in Terminal, run ifconfig eth0

Test passes if: the "extreme power management" checkbox is still on after reboot, and ifconfig output says you you have "no such device" (or prints some similar "you can't get connected" type message)

Assigning to frances to test.

[mchua]

Test passes. Closing.