Wireless not enabled automatically on Acer Aspire One

The first problem, or niggle really, is the wireless. When I boot the netbook wireless is not enabled automatically. It’s a simple matter to right-click the network manager applet and select Enable Wireless, then everything seems fine. Just annoying.

So of the the University of Google to find who else shares my pain. Before long I discover that this might be an Acer thing (none of my other PCs have this problem). Like many problems there’s often lots written and complex solutions. I don’t want complicated solutions, I just want the loose-wire solution. Press a button and it’s all lovely.

Sure enough, a post on the Linux Mint forums described exactly what I’m experiencing. There’s another forum post that describes one fix, but I ended up following the hints described in this thread.

Sometimes I like to understand what’s going on under the bonnet, sometimes I try and understand what’s going on, and sometimes I just copy and paste. Like so …

dougie@barra ~ $ rfkill list all
0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: yes
    Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
dougie@barra ~ $

and …

dougie@barra ~ $ sudo rmmod -f acer-wmi
dougie@barra ~ $ sudo rfkill unblock all
dougie@barra ~ $ rfkill list all
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
dougie@barra ~ $

As soon as I ran the rmmod line the wireless suddenly sprang into life.

The next trick is to get this to happen automatically on boot, which is pretty straightforwards. Just add the lines to the end of /etc/rc.local as explained in post 12 of this thread.