Ubuntu 11.04 wireless WiFi issue on Sony Vaio Y
I installed Ubuntu 11.04 via Wubi and the first thing I faced was problem with WiFi. The checkbox “Enable Wireless” in connection menu was disabled and gray. So here is the way I managed to solve the problem with the help of internet, of course.
The first thing I looked through was Wireless Trobleshooting Guide on the Ubuntu Forum. I did command nm-tool and understood one more time that wireless network was disabled.
Then I followed the link to check the Device Drivers. The command lshw lists hardware. For our goals one better uses sudo lshw -C network just not to mess with lots of non-network hardware. In the output one can see driver and other things. I just found that driver ath9k was installed and picked out logical name of my wifi: wlan0.
Unlike the previous steps the next steps were just what I needed. Tool rfkill is for enabling/disabling wireless devices. The command rfkill list shows the list of devices and whether they are blocked. (Here one should check if the wireless button on the laptop is switched on.)
0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 1: sony-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 2: sony-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 4: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no
I don’t know why there was acer-wifi in the list, but I suppose the problem was in it. So I needed to remove it from the list and unblock wifi. Like this
sudo rmmod -f acer-wmi sudo rfkill unblock all
After that wifi worked great. I hope, it will be helpful to somebody.
