Fixing wifi on a Sony Vaio M111AX running Ubuntu 10.04

My cute new Sony Vaio M111AX couldn't see its wifi card, a RealTek 2860.  Luckily it's a popular netbook card, and after sifting through this ubuntu forum post, and ubuntu bug 541620, it turns out to be reeeeely simple.  When /var/log/messages (or dmesg) says this:

Jul  5 14:38:17 smuurgh kernel: [   15.936530] !!! rt28xx Initialized fail !!!
Jul  5 14:38:17 smuurgh kernel: [   16.409677] RtmpOSFileOpen(): Error 2 opening /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
Jul  5 14:38:17 smuurgh kernel: [   16.409686] Open file "/etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat" failed!

It doesn't even care what's in the file, just that it exists.  So if you create an empty file:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/
sudo touch /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat

Your wireless card should appear as soon as you restart the network-manager:

sudo service network-manager restart