The Atheros wifi chip in my wife's Aspire One died. I bought an Intel wifi chip to replace it (I did the same thing about a year ago to my older-model Aspire One).
It turns out that the Atheros chip in the newer Aspire One is tiny, like the size of a big postage stamp. The replacement Intel chip is larger, like half a business card. The Aspire One has two PCI slots...one small and one large. Great, so I just installed the new Intel board in the larger PCI slot, where it fit.
After reassembly, the Intel wifi board would not work. Linux detected it fine, and loaded the right driver and everything. However the GUI said 'not available'. Running ifconfig -wlan1 up gave the following error: "Not possible due to rfkill".
So then I had to google rfkill. I tried to run "rfkill unblock all". I tried to delete /dev/rfkill and reboot. No matter what, rfkill showed the wifi chip as "hard blocked", but not "soft blocked". That seems to be what would happen if the computer had a hardware switch to turn the wifi on and off, but it doesn't. I can only assume that the other PCI slot is there, but it's disabled in the BIOS somehow, or by ACPI. No matter what, rfkill always showed the card as 'hard blocked'.
I ended up jamming the Intel card into the smaller card slot, taping it in with kapton tape (because the hole didn't line up) and dremeling a channel in the plastic chassis so the antenna wires would fit the longer PCI card. This will probably work until my wife drops the latop on its side and dislodges the card. Any ideas why the card would be detected, load the driver, but not work?
