rfkill list; 0: phy0: Wireless LAN; Soft blocked: no. Hard blocked: yes.

[Tom H]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Detlef Lechner <Detlef.Lechner at gmx.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-12-10 at 13:43 +0100, Detlef Lechner wrote:
>>
>> '~$ rfkill list; 0: phy0: Wireless LAN; Soft blocked: no. Hard blocked:
>> yes."
>> How can I get rid of this hard blockade?
>> dmesg: "ipw2200: Radio Kill Switch is On: Kill switch must be turned off
>> for wireless networking to work."
>> This blockade exists since I dist-upgraded to Maverick. In the past
>> using Ubuntu 9.04 I was able to switch on WLAN by pressing a certain
>> (soft) key combination which I had programmed myself. The package rfkill
>> was not installed.
>> This computer MD97600 has no hard kill switch.
>
> /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:06:05.0/ieee802211/phy0/rfkill
> contains the value 1. According
> to /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.35/Documentation/ABI/stable/sys-class-rfkill this seems to mean: "The transmitter is forced off by something outside of the driver's control."

Have you tried loading the driver with "options ipw2200 rfkill=0"
through "/etc/modprobe.d/ipw2200.conf"?

(You'll have to update or re-create the initrd.)