Wifi activation problem - HP 2000

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:53 AM, William Muriithi <
william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>
> > Sadly, on my machine, the lock is handled via a "soft-key", essentially
via running Windows, and pressing "Fn-F12", which would cause a little LED
that is presently orange to switch to blue, and allow a different output
than rfkill is showing:
> >
> > root at hpaq:~# rfkill list 1
> > 1: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
> >         Soft blocked: no
> >         Hard blocked: yes
> > root at hpaq:~# rfkill unblock 1
> > root at hpaq:~# rfkill list 1
> > 1: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
> >         Soft blocked: no
> >         Hard blocked: yes
> >
> > I don't have any Windows install around, so can't reboot there to do a
switcheroo.  I see some suggestions that one might muss around in BIOS and
find an option that would force wifi to stay on; that does not appear to be
the case with this particular system.
> >
> > It is looking pretty likely, as consequence, that I'll need to grab a
USB wireless adapter for those times I want wireless, which is unfortunate,
but not too totally disastrous.
> >
> Crap, that kind of sucks. Which HP model is that? Would be good to name
it so that others can avoid it. Kind of take up back to win modem times.


Annoying, indeed.

http://linuxdatabases.info/info/hpaq.html

The model is "HP 2000 2b53CA"

Encouragingly, I wasn't too distant from feasible Wifi configuration...

I picked up a TP-Link TL-WN727N this afternoon, on sale for $11.99, which
happens to use the very same kernel driver as the built-in wireless
adapter, and getting the WN727N required only that I run the substitution
  s/wlan0/wlan1/g
on /etc/network/interfaces

Immediately upon running "ifup wlan1", it was recognized, headed off to my
DHCP server to get an address, and was, "shazam!", on the my network.
 (Indicating that the stanzas I had in /etc/network/interfaces were AOK,
and that drivers were in good shape)

Hugh has a couple of links to references to the "huh, Fn-F12 doesn't work!"
problem; I saw other similar, none with meaningful answers.  This seems
likely to be an issue adversely affecting a number of laptops, so beware.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20130512/2530318f/attachment.html>