The wireless button on Compaq Presario CQ50-110EM appears to do nothing, and does not change the state of the wireless connectivity. It appears that this may be the cause of the problem reported in the Ubuntu bug report, although I am not certain. Ubuntu bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/816145 This has been a problem since 2007/8, when the wireless worked, albeit intermittently, but now not at all. The mainline kernel v3.0-rc7 has been tested and the problem is not resolved in that version. Full logs and more information is available at that report (saves duplication and clutter). If any more information is needed, please do not hesitate to contact me.
rfkill hard blocked by hp-wifi...
My guess was that the hp-wifi is the button itself, which has no effect, the other #4 (phy0) is the kernel controlled driver. I'm probably wrong...
What happens if you try rfkill unblock 0 ?
How the hell??? It's working (or seems to be), the numbers changed to 0 and 1 on first boot for hp-wifi and phy0 respectively. I did sudo rfkill unblock 0 and then 1 and it works fine. Actually, it did work, scanned for signals, came up with ESSIDs in network-manager and had set itself back to 0 hp-wifi Hard blocked: yes Everything else is still no. I just tried sudo rfkill unblock 0 again and now both hardware and software is saying blocked: yes
On 0:hp-wifi sorry, not phy0, they're both 'no'
Created attachment 66732 [details] Updated logs Here are zipped logs from the latest try (see above). I stuffed as much in as I thought may be useful to finding the root of the problem. Hope it helps.
I experienced this bug too on my compaq presario, and the bug is still here.