I recently reinstalled Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and noticed on first boot that my wireless was disabled and the kill switch on the side of my laptop didn't respond. Here are my specs (Rig 4):

Test Machines

The laptop uses an Intel 3945 chipset. When I checked the status with rfkill list it said my dell wlan was "hard blocked." I looked around and found a bug report on this that offered a solution, that involved removing a problematic module, "dell_laptop."

I removed it with this command:

Code:
rmmod dell_laptop
The Network Manager immediately showed my wireless network and I was able to connect. To prevent this module from loading again, I blacklisted it using the method described here. So far all is well. I just wanted to pass this along in case someone has similar trouble.


HOWTO: Prevent (blacklist) modules from loading - Ubuntu Forums