I thought I had encountered every kind of problem working with wireless, but this is a new one for me.

I installed F13 on an Acer laptop for a friend who is just beginning with Linux. This laptop has the dreaded Broadcom chipset and is using the b43 driver. When it was first installed, wireless was automatically detected and worked fine. However, as usual, there was about 200MB of updates after the install, and the wireless was downloading extremely slowly, so I connected eth0 just to complete the updates. Ever since, the wireless will not work. When the machine is booted, wireless is shown as disabled in Network Manager. I remembered that there was a wireless switch on the front of the laptop and switching it on allows me to check the enable wireless box, but wireless says device not ready.

ifconfig wlan0 up returns:

Code:

I assumed this meant that the switch was in OFF position, but it is not. iwconfig shows the wireless is detected.

Anyone have a clue was it going on with this? It appears that there is a script for rf_kill somewhere in the filesystem that is keeping this from working.

Thanks for any replies.

Bob

Has your wireless driver upgraded in the process? Maybe to deinstall it and install it again?