The Lenovo S10e Network Hardware Protocols

[g3power]

I just had a wonderful few hours with my Lenovo S10e. The reason was this: I am misusing the netbook as a home server and it literally has served me well these past few month. Today I needed an ad-hoc wireless hotspot to share a 3G internet link with some wireless devices over WiFi.

 

Most of these devices have 802.11n support, which the S10e lacks in its standard configuration. So I installed a Broadcom BCM43xx-based 802.11n card I had in storage after removing it from an iMac. It showed up immediately in the System Profiler and the menu bar.

 

The problem: to my great chagrin I couldn’t actually activate AirPort. I also had previously wondered why Bluetooth was shown as missing in the menu bar. I had had it working a while ago. So I rebooted and went into the BIOS settings. Wireless was enabled there so that couldn’t be the reason.

 

In a moment of divine inspiration I reset the BIOS to defaults and changed the boot order back to what I prefer. I had not changed anything else from the defaults before as far as I could remember. I made sure that mass storage was set to AHCI, saved and exited. And lo and behold: I could enable AirPort and it immediately showed me all the useless hot spots in the area!

 

Sadly the odyssey didn’t end here. The next problem came up when I reattached my Realtek 8111DL-based Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard/34. I have not tried hot-plugging the card, so I did that while the machine was off. I am using Lnx2Mac’s amazing RealtekRTL81xx driver. I doubt that it has hot-plug support, but I may be wrong.

 

Upon booting the Ethernet driver was not loaded. That was quite annoying. I tried a lot of things, including another BIOS reset. Nothing helped. The WiFI worked, but the wired Ethernet didn’t, no matter what I tried. In the end, I reinstalled the 802.11g card that came with the S10e.

 

I would be very interested in any ideas people might have to use both the 802.11n and the Gigabit Ethernet card at the same time.

 

So to sum things up:

• If you can see an AirPort device in the System Profiler, but can’t activate it, try a BIOS reset. This may be limited to notebooks/netbooks that come with WiFi hardware preinstalled (the BIOS “knows” about the WiFi hardware).
  
• PCIe devices can interfere with each other. This probably is a BIOS issue as well. The default WiFi (Broadcom 4311) coexists well enough with the Ethernet ExpressCard in my S10e.