Comment 54 for bug 53310

Tomas. I've looked at the provided logs and the kernel source-code involved.

The logs show that the PC (I assume this is still the Prestigio 157?) doesn't provide a radio frequency kill switch using the usual HAL (hardware abstraction layer) identity. Here's an example of what I'd expect to see (from a 3945ABG):

lshal | sed -n '/^udi = .*rfkill/,/^udi =/ p'
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/pci_8086_4222_rfkill_3945ABG_wlan'

With the 2915ABG devices here that doesn't show up either so not a major problem. There is however a node in the /sys/devices/ tree that actively reflects the kill-switch state provided by the ipw2200 module. Here's a bit of code to see if your PC has the same:

KILL="$(find /sys/devices -name rf_kill)"
if [ ! -z "$KILL" ] && cat $KILL

The values reported have these meanings (from the ipw2200 source):

 /* 0 - RF kill not enabled
    1 - SW based RF kill active (sysfs)
    2 - HW based RF kill active
    3 - Both HW and SW baed RF kill active */

Depending on the result you can try manually changing it. I'd be interested to know if it is possible to actually make the radio turn on/off using it:

echo 1 > sudo tee $KILL

When I do that on the Vaio notebooks with 2915ABG the NetworkManager applet reports no network device almost immediately. I can re-enable it by doing:

echo 0 > sudo tee $KILL

If I use the hardware switch to kill the radio I see:

cat $KILL
2

If the ipw2200 module has no control over the state of the radio kill switch - if it can only read the status - then I'm going to close this bug as Invalid (since it isn't a problem with ipw2200) and move to your other specific bug #53953 "change 'acerhk' to use 'autowlan=1' by default".