Realtek WiFi card suddenly irreversibly hard blocked

Originally Posted by skoenie @Arcosanti, I tried your suggestions - the first still my card hard blocked - wcid also only recognizes the ethernet card, it was not easy to install however (first DBus problem, and I even though it got an IP-address I was not able to surf the internet) - I am not able to install the Realtek driver, the download needs to be compiled as I understand it, running make results in an error

You'll want to forget about compiling this driver. It is an old driver and it has been added to the kernel you are using. It looks like the problem might not have anything to do with the card driver at all. I found an Ubuntu thread where some people were having the same problem as you but with a Broadcom and I think an Intel card.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ghlight=rfkill

I cant guarantee that this will work but you can try it:

sudo rmmod -f rtl8191se
sudo rfkill unblock all
sudo modprobe rtl8191se

Then go to the /etc/modprobe.d directory and create a file called rtl8191se with an editor and put the following in it and save:

alias wlan0 rtl8191se
options rtl8191se disable_hw_scan=1

Then do

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sudo reboot

One other thing you might want to check on. Go into your BIOS cmos setup and see if there is an option concerning your RF killswitch. If there is, it should toggle between hardware control and software control. Set it to hardware control. That will make it work through the BIOS. The other setting I believe requires software installed to make the killswitch work.

http://blog.edwardmgrant.com/?p=1410
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2182953

Usually when comm hardware becomes hopelessly locked there is a conflict. Have you tried logging out of the window manager (wm) and dropping to the native shell prompt? I found that it is much easier to manage comm hardware when working in bash with X11 completely shutdown. Once the configuration is set, using wicd-curses, I can startx and everything works perfectly in the wm.

I would try what our Guru has suggested as well as what Arcosanti has suggested and see if that gets your WiFi working. Let us know skoenie if it works or not.