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.)