I recently bought a laptop : Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E420. This laptop along with most of the new laptops come with Intel Centrino Wireless N 1000 as the Wireless network adapter.
Now comes the problem. In most linux, like Fedora and Ubuntu, you can’t enable the wireless adapter. In both my Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04, I could see that when I try enabling the wireless networking using the function key, the wireless part of the menu just blinks and says “Device is not Ready” as in case of Ubuntu and in Fedora, it says that its “disabled”. During this “blinking” I can see that the adapter is infact getting enabled and I can even see my home network being detected for less than a second and it goes back to disabled/not ready.
I am yet to find a solution that works in Fedora. However, I have found a solution from this webpage – http://computerandu.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/how-to-solve-no-wireless-network-in-ubuntu-11-04-centrino-wireless-n-1000/ , that did work well in Ubuntu. The solution is as follows :
1) rmmod -f acer-wmi
Somehow in both the distros, I find that an invalid driver called Acer-Wireless is getting activated for my hardware. This driver is whats making the wireless card act crazy. So, here, I am disabling that driver.
2) rfkill unblock all
Removing soft-locks if any. You can check if any locks exist by using rfkill list all.
3) Once things are working fine, I can make the change permanent by doing the following :
echo “blacklist acer-wmi” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
P.S: Make sure all of this is done as root/sudo.
