Wireless is working again, yay!

[pne]

So at some point during my trip to Saarbrücken for the qepHom last November, I managed to disabled the WiFi on my laptop. It has a hardware switch with an LED, and it somehow got into a state where it was permanently off, and clicking the switch didn't switch it back on.

I couldn't enable WiFi from Network Manager because it said it was disabled by hardware switch ... but I had no idea how to get it working again. I was even considering reinstalling on the off-chance that that might fix it.

But this evening I googled for "compaq nc6220 hardware wifi switch" and found this entry which linked to this one, which had the magic incantation!

tl;dr: after installing "rfkill" and running rfkill unblock wifi, the LED started flashing, I got asked for my keychain password, and I was connected to my home WiFi network! Yay!

Comments

[ewx]

I’ve seen this a couple of times now. (Did you mention it here? I think I’d have mentioned rfkill if so, but I don’t remember.) I think it was associated with a restart when the machine was supposed to be hibernated, but I couldn’t swear to that (and wouldn’t want to introduce that idea as a red herring into any attempts to properly characterize the situation that causes it).

[pne]

Did you mention it here?

Not sure; I don't specifically remember mentioning it or not.

I think it was associated with a restart when the machine was supposed to be hibernated, but I couldn’t swear to that

That's a possibility; I had the machine hibernated pretty often during the qepHom.

(Because since my update to Lubuntu 11.10, the screen brightness dropped to 20% once the screen blank kicked in, and I couldn't fix that. And if I simply suspended-to-RAM, the wireless light would keep blinking, so I usually suspended-to-disk/hibernated when I wasn't actively using it, even if I was still in front of it, so that I wouldn't get hit by the 20% brightness bug. I wonder whether that's still there.)

[schnurble]

I love it that you can find an answer to almost every problem with google. Sometimes I wonder how we could survive without the internet only a few years ago...

[pne]

Though depressingly often, Google just finds someone asking the same question and not getting an answer.

(Or someone asking the question and getting an answer, and you have to guess whether that answer from 2007 is still appropriate in today's versions of the software.)