Disabling internal wireless card in linux

I bought this Zotac zbox a while back to play with a small computer attached to a touch screen monitor: wanted to experiment with android-x86. The one big problem with this box is that it has a worthless internal wireless card and it frequently keeps disconnecting even when it is 6 feet away from my wireless router.

However, disabling this is not simple. There is nothing in the BIOS to disable the card and in Ubuntu 10 there is no straightforward way of disabling a wireless interface. Several searches and a lot of dead ends later, I came across an article that said that NetworkManager will not manage interfaces that are marked as manual in /etc/networking/interfaces. The basic idea is to mark the unwanted interface as manual and never manual activate it.

So this is what I added to my /etc/network/interfaces and all works. The applet shows the built in card as device not managed and it stays that way after a reboot.


# disable the builtin wireless card
auto wlan0 wlan1
iface wlan0 inet manual
    down ifconfig $IFACE down

The other thing I had to do was to stop Ubuntu from bugging me for the WPA password (for which it needs the keyring password) was to follow the steps from ubuntu-tutorials.com. I'm also listing the steps below in case the URL is unavailable later on

• sudo aptitude install libpam-keyring (was not needed on Ubuntu 10)
• echo "@include common-pamkeyring" | sudo tee -a /etc/pam.d/gdm
• requires that your login password and the keyring password be the same. 

So now, I can mount my router attached USB share on my zotax box, and all is setup to launch a picasa slideshow making for a nice 21inch touchscreen Picture Frame (Will be best after I get android-x86 onto it but for now it is dog slow and this solution works for me). Will keep checking on the progress of the android-x86 folks though as having android run on a large touch screen will be fantastic.