Lenovo B560: upgrade Debian squeeze to wheezy kills Wi-Fi

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 15:51

Upgraded Debian squeeze to wheezy and lost Wi-Fi.

Symptoms:

Right click on Network Manager icon -> Enable wireless is not checked. Attempt to check is has no effect
rfkill list lists ireless network as soft blocked
Attempt to enable Wi-Fi with rfkill unblock or using function key while Network Manager is running hangs the system

The reason:

rfkill list shows two wireless devices: ideapad_wlan and acer_wlan. So apparently the module which provides driver for acer_wlan is loaded by mistake. Indeed lsmod lists acer_wmi.

Solution:

Adding blacklist acer_wmi to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf resolves the problem completely.