Must restart if turn wifi switch off, won't turn back on (Acer 5920G)

[chubby127]

Hi, I have an Acer 5920G and am runing 8.10. Everything works out of the box for me on the laptop... except one thing i noticed a few days ago. When I boot up Ubuntu Wifi works and the LED blinks like it should. If i decide to turn Wifi off and connect an ethernet cord then that also works fine too.The problem occurs when i want to start using my Wifi again, when i press the Wifi button nothing happens. The light just never comes back on and Ubuntu still claims that wireless is disabled even though i pressed the button. The only way I can get Wifi to work again and the LED to come back on is when i restart my computer. It's not really a big problem just something little that has been annnoying me lately. Thanks in advance!

[blackened]

Instead of restarting your machine, you can likely just restart your wireless adapter. Use

ifconfig

to find the name of your wireless adapter (mine is wlan0, yours might be as well depending on manufacturer) and then use (if it is wlan0, otherwise substitute your adapter name in place of wlan0 in the following command)

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

That should get your connection going again. Make sure you have the wireless switch turned on.

[chubby127]

Thanks a lot Blackened, the second command got the wireless working again.

[teaker1s]

could be caused by key code for powering on not registered- does it seem like a physical hardware switch or software switch

xev

should allow you to tell

[blackened]

could be caused by key code for powering on not registered- does it seem like a physical hardware switch or software switch

xev

should allow you to tell

My wireless switch does the same thing. If I turn it off and then back on I have to use ifconfig to bring the wireless adapter back up.

xev doesn't report anything when wireless switch is turned off/on, which I assume it's supposed to do.

[teaker1s]

some wireless switches generate keycodes and if so can be made to reload wireless. In this case it appears that yours is a hardware power switch.

[chubby127]

So ever since I entered "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up" my wireless works again but now every single wireless network within range has a 100% signal strength. Is there any way I can get the signals to report their actual strength again? This hadn't been a problem for me until I entered "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up." Thanks

[jalirious]

Kids

AA1 - the hardware switch disables wifi, but no renabling. 9.04

xev [hardware switch for wifi]

*************************

KeyPress event, serial 32, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001,
root 0xa5, subw 0x0, time 5584629, (675,86), root682,451),
state 0x0, keycode 246 (keysym 0x1008ff95, XF86WLAN), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001,
root 0xa5, subw 0x0, time 5584635, (675,86), root682,451),
state 0x0, keycode 246 (keysym 0x1008ff95, XF86WLAN), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

*********************

Any ideas (other than installing linpus) to get wifi happiness?

cheers

[blackened]

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