My friend has been running Ubuntu 11.10 for quite some time. Everything had been working fine.
The laptop shut down because of battery and when rebooted, the wireless lan hasn't been working with a message "Wireless is disabled by hardware switch". He has checked that the hardware switch is indeed on.
The output of rfkill list
is as follows:
0: ideapad_wlan: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
2: ideapad_bluetooth: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
He even tried rfkill unblock all
but rfkill list
still showed Hard blocked: yes
for phy0: Wireless LAN.
Following is the description of wireless interface returned by lshw
:
*-network DISABLED
description: Wireless interface
product: Centrino Wireless-N 1000
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:06:00.0
logical name: wlan1
version: 00
serial: 74:e5:0b:0c:39:0e
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlagn driverversion=3.0.0-14-generic-pae firmware=128.50.3.1 build 13488 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
resources: irq:42 memory:e8100000-e8101fff
Just for the info, my friend doesn't have Windows on his machine.
rfkill list
shows Hard Blocked: yes for all entries.