No wireless if switch is off on boot

Question

My vaio laptop has a wireless kill switch, if it is switched off and then boot the system, there is no wireless detected even if I switch it on later, I noticed Opensuse 11 also has this problem, they both have kernel 2.6.25, however, Ubuntu Hardy (kernel 2.6.24) does not have this problem, I can switch the wireless on after boot and the system just detects and scans wireless network.

Answer 1

What megamixman says is right, that's how you need to automate the use of the kill switch. On my Vaio, the acpi event is given to my acpi handler script as:
arg $1 = sony/hotkey
arg $2 and arg $3 = I forget, it down't matter
arg $4 = 0000003c to mean radio was switched on, 0000003d to mean radio was switched off
But your hardware may be different. You'll need to log the events or something to see how your hardware is reporting the kill switch actions.
All that being said, though, I think the original poster may have had a different concern: maybe he's finding himself unable to even MANUALLY start up his wifi, if he boots with the radio switched off but subsequently switches it on. If he can't do it manually, then he can't script it either.
If this is the concern, then I suggest that maybe booting with the radio switched off results in your wifi driver not being loaded. So after you switch the radio on, you may have to manually do something like this:
sudo modprobe iwl3945
That's assuming you use sudo not su; and you should replace your own wifi driver for iwl3945. That's what I use on my Vaio, but perhaps you use iwl4965 or something else.
If that doesn't help, then sorry, I don't know what else to suggest. Other than always booting with the radio switched on. How often do you boot your laptop anyway?