Airplane mode

Airplanes probably don't actually need you to turn your wireless off. (The whole thing about turning off consumer electronics in airplanes is a vast overreaction to an almost non-problem.) However, if you find it necessary you may apply one of the following methods.

Method 0: Remove battery

This is the fast method, for when a stewardess is getting mad at you. Close the laptop, flip it over, slide the latches, and remove the battery. Poof, no more radio signal.

Method 1: Disable wireless temporarily until next reboot

This method will turn the radio off only until the next reboot. So there is an issue when during a flight your XO is turned off. Naturally, the 802.11 wireless radio does not interfere with the aircraft controls, and you can simply turn your XO on, wait until it boots and disable the radio then. If you want to avoid this, you can disable the radio when still on land and keep your XO turned on or suspended to save power. Alternatively you can disable the radio permanently as described in Method 2.

• To turn the radio off go to Terminal activity and type:

sugar-control-panel -s radio off

• To turn it back on go to Terminal activity and type:

sugar-control-panel -s radio on

Method 2: Disable wireless permanently

This method will keep the radio off even after reboots. Therefore you can turn the radio off when on land and turn the XO off as well until you need to use it. When landed you can recover the radio back to normal.

• To turn the radio off go to Terminal activity or Virtual Terminal and type:

su
/sbin/rmmod usb8xxx
mv /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin.quiet
# This takes effect immediately.  There is no need to reboot.

• To turn it back on go to Terminal activity or Virtual Terminal and type:

su
mv /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin.quiet /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin
rmmod usb8xxx
sleep 1
modprobe usb8xxx
# You will likely need to reboot for wireless to resume.

Saving Power

Neither of these last two methods reduces the power draw of the wireless chips. OLPC hopes to be providing a GUI interface that will not only turn it off, but also stop it from burning up your battery. The chips burn more power than they were designed to, and the vendor is disinclined to fix this. The power supply to the chips cannot actually be turned off, due to a hardware design defect; but the chips can be forced into "RESET" indefinitely, and they take much less power in that state. See ticket #6935