Wifi button does not work on HP Compaq NC4000

I have a HP Compaq NC4000 running pclinuxos with KDE 4.3.4

The problem is the wifi is permanently on and when I press the wifi button on the laptop this does not turn it off. All that happens is the little blue light flickers momentarily and does not turn off. When I had windows on the laptop everything was working fine.

Does anyone know how I can fix this problem? I am a really newbie with linux so need to know what to do step by step.

Thanks Dave

What distribution+version of Linux are you using? On some systems, the wifi button/switch is hardwired to the wireless card's radio, and others just generate a hardware interrupt which the operating system has to be programmed to handle. Some newer versions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, seem to handle this better than others. In your case, it seems that the switch/button is not hardwired but is the type that generates a hardware interrupt, and that is being ignored. It may be configurable, but without knowning more about your operating system I cannot say for sure.

Thanks for your reply. The distro I am using is PclinuxOS 2009. I hope this helps

Thanks Dave

Try a Ubuntu liveCD and see if the button works with that. I'm not familiar with PCLinuxOS personally, but I've had good results with Ubuntu on a number of laptops.