Disabling wifi on the Eee PC 701

I have installed the normal Ubuntu 8.04 distribution on my EeeP, applying the usual fixes.

I still had problems with the Wifi hotkey: the ath0 interface was still up and consuming power. I finally set it up this way:

In /etc/acpi/events/eee-wifi-off and /etc/acpi/events/eee-wifi-on, use the wireless.sh script provided with ubuntu:

action=/etc/acpi/wireless.sh

Then edit /etc/acpi/wireless.sh and add these lines before the call to toggleAllWirelessStates:

if [[ -d /sys/class/net/ath0 ]]; then
   /etc/acpi/eee-wifi-on-off.sh on
fi

After a reboot, I could totally disable the wifi interface: it isn't returned by ifconfig ath0 and the wifi led is out. I haven't had the time to check battery life without wifi, but it should help.

Now I still have to look at the configuration to get a notification when battery capacity is getting low....