Wifi adapter - cannot change settings in /sys
 

I was wondering whether any of you guys might be able to help with this. I am a Linux newbie...

In order to get wireless to work on my Amilo Li1718 under Puppy 4.1.1 (full hard disk install), I need to load a module called acer-wmi to do two things: (i) enable the wireless adapter, (ii) switch on the PC's wireless button. I therefore run 'modprobe acer-wmi' which appears to work fine and enables the wireless adapter.

The problem is that, in order to switch on the actual button itself, I need to change the contents of a file called 'wireless' created by that module in a /sys subdirectory, using the command 'echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/wireless'. Simply, this doesn't work, and any attempts to modify this file fail. In fact, experimentation has shown that I cannot change any file in the /sys branch. Trying to load the module with 'modprobe acer-wmi wireless=1' does not work.

I have searched about and noticed that many people seem to have successfully been able to echo data into files in /sys. Why is it that I can't?

Here is my command sequence:
Many thanks,

Pete