2 replies to this topic

[Melchoire]

The problem is straight out of the blue. All of the sudden the wireless interface on my laptop decided to stop working. I traced the problem to the hardware being disabled. Meaning the driver is installed and running but the for some reason it is disabled. I suspect this would be the same as hitting the wireless button that most laptops comes with these days.

Here's what that looks like when I run "lshw -C network"

*-network DISABLED
description: Wireless interface
product: AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter
vendor: Atheros Communications Inc.
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 01
serial: 00:24:2c:52:fc:16
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath5k driverversion=2.6.35-22-generic firmware=N/A latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg
resources: irq:17 memory:d2600000-d260ffff

I've read around and it seems you can use rfkill to enable/disable interfaces. So running "rfkill list all" gives me:

0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: yes
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: no

So you can see the wireless interface is blocked, I think the other one is bluetooth but I'm not positive. Unfortunately running "rfkill unblock all" doesn't change anything at all. Both interfaces retain the same status.

Other than that I'm out of ideas and thought I'd ask here.

What do?

Edit: hitting the wireless button will hard-unblock hp-wifi but it remains soft blocked. What the difference is between the two, I have no idea but it doesn't fix the problem.

[Junsu]

Soft-blocked = They blocked your MAC address?

[Melchoire]

As per one of my co-worker's suggestions I installed ubuntu 11.04 onto a partition on my laptop and on this one the wireless works without a hitch. Although I had to run "rfkill unblock all" the first time it booted up.

It's still really strange because I was using the wireless without any problems on ubuntu 10.10 for the longest time. But I guess hardware compatibility issues is something you have to expect when using linux.