Well I got a great laugh at myself this morning as I booted up and had no wireless connection. Sometimes the obvious is to close and you loose all perspective. You see I spent about an hour checking settings, viewing logs, starting and stopping networking, rebooting … just about anything I could think of. Of course nothing made sense so I started googling to see what I could be missing.

Keep in mind I did say “obvious” at the beginning.

Googling pointed me to a number of resources and they all commented about loading the current firmware and drivers. The wireless NIC is an Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915.

In an earlier post I noted getting a new laptop at the beginning of the year and since then have switched from Fedora to Ubuntu.

But then I got to thinking after loading Ubuntu wireless worked, in fact it worked out of the box and without a problem. So then I changed my tune as far as what I was searching for. Things had to of stopped working for a reason. So after a little more googling I “paid attention” to what was in dmesg.

$ dmesg | grep ipw2200
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 0.19
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On:

Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On … right there in front of me and I didn’t even pay attention. Now mind you I’m not using the windows driver and the LED does not come on. So I checked what was set for the driver and sure enough “we are not searching for an wireless networks”.

$ cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/0000:02:06.0/rf_kill
2

With Ubuntu, or at least Horay and the package kernel, there is no software setting.. the driver does not support it. But if you push the wireless NIC button on the laptop rf_kill changes to 0. Wireless is up … end of story.

So don’t forget to check the obvious and save yourself some head scratching otherwise you might drift off into DEU (Delinquent End User) land.