I saw my old Notebook yesterday and wanted to make that work again. On Windows XP the wireless worked still fine. Then I installed new Ubuntu 11.10 32bit and I'm sadly not able to make the wireless enabled. [I replaced Win XP entirely]

lspci lists following network:

08:0a.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

So after recommendation from this link I installed the b43 firmware module.

iwconfig prints the following:

wlan0   IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
        Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associatd  Tx-Power=off
        Retry long limit:7  RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
        Power Management: off

As you can see, my wireless lan adapter is not turned on.

sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower auto

Doesn't change anything. Then I tried to make it work with rfkill.

rfkill list
    0: phy0: Wirless LAN
            Soft blocked: no
            Hard blocked: yes
sudo rfkill unblock all
rfkill list
    0: phy0: Wireless LAN
            Soft blocked: no
            Hard blocked: yes

remains the same.

The question is now, how I could enable the hard blocked wireless LAN. There is no hardware switch for wlan integrated. However there is a button to change the state. I always thought this would be software sided, but it seems to make some hardware changes as well... The wireless LED is also not blinking (as it did on windows xp)

I reset bios and searched for some settings in there, but it has only a few options and nothing to do with wireless settings, nothing works here..

At last I tried to install the acer hotkeys but I was not able to manage that. I installed the acerhkgui package, but in initializing progress, it was not able to compile acer hotkeys for my machine. There was a message that asm/linkage.h was not found while compiling.

Do you have any ideas what I could do to make this hard blocked stuff disabled and my wireless card work?

PS: I also tried sudo rm /dev/rfkill and a reboot to reinit that stuff... No success :(