Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413, Amilo A1650g

[dkgspam]

Search engine stuff in case this helps anyone:
  ath5k, wireless, acer_wmi, Fujitsu, Siemens, amilo, rfkill

I have a fujitsu siemens amilo A1650G and need help with activating my wireless "card" with the vector live cd.

The steps I took in ubuntu (11.04) were:
  modprobe acer_wmi. To make permanent->(added "acer_wmi" to  /etc/modules file)
  sudo rfkill unblock wifi.  To make permanent->(added "rfkill unblock wifi" to /etc/rc.local)

Booting from the vector live cd, I could "modprobe acer_wmi" but rfkill wasn't available.
Is there a different way of enabling my wireless "card" in Vector.  I'm after a fast, minimal hardware resource friendly live cd with ntfs access and gparted along with internet access but with a low footprint.  Vector looks VERY nice, how can I get around this issue?

Or is there another live cd distro anyone can recommend for general diag/repair, on low end systems, with ntfs, ext4, wifi and partitioning tools as standard?

[hata_ph]

Boot to VL LIVE CD and post the output of lspci and lsmod...

[roarde]

Or is there another live cd distro anyone can recommend for general diag/repair, on low end systems, with ntfs, ext4, wifi and partitioning tools as standard?

Many here would recommend Puppy Linux for this. It's much more hardware-generic; for installation and true glue-to-hardware I strongly prefer VL, but a couple of brief looks at Puppy and advice from others in this forum suggest Puppy is better to tote across several machines, as it's designed specifically for that. Ntfs and ext4 have to be added, but I'm told that one just adds the packages, then menu-setup-remaster to create a new live cd that includes what you've added.

FWIW, as the signature says, I'm running AR2413 on a VIA-based board. It was detected and set up easily as I recall, but this is an installation version of 6 Light. Wicd is an easy way to connect, but some of the live cd's failed to fill in "Wireless interface" under wicd's preferences-general settings. In the past, it's usually been wlan0 -- my info may be (ok, is) old, so ignore that if anyone tells you differently.

[dkgspam]

I'd post lspci and lsmod results (one of which didn't run from the terminal, but had to find it on the mounted live cd)  When I got the output of both, I tried to save them somewhere...  I couldn't mount my ubuntu partition (ext4) and my blackberry (mass storage enabled) wasn't found.  next step would have been e-mailing myself/saving to a cloud account, but of course I had no internet access.  I'll eventually find a solution.  Thanks all.  I sincerely regret having stuck with ubuntu as a distro for "learning linux" for the past 4 years.  OK, it (mostly) "just works" but when it doesn't, I have no idea why it doesn't work or how it should work (Some "HOW" and "WHY" is knowledge I'm missing).  Wish I'd started my linux adventures with slackware from day one.

I'll read up on puppy, thanks for the suggestion.

(Posted from my ubuntu installation, using wifi... why/how...?)

[GrannyGeek]

I'd post lspci and lsmod results (one of which didn't run from the terminal, but had to find it on the mounted live cd) 

If you type
/sbin/lspci
or
/sbin/lsusb
in a terminal, the commands will run. If you are root, you don't need to put /sbin in front of the command, but as user, you can run the commands as long as you precede them with /sbin.
--GrannyGeek