Month: October 2012

Kubuntu 12.10 Released (Tarah does a dance and installs on four different boxes)

tarah Leave a comment

I am more excited than usual for the release of Quantal Quetzal.

Holy CRAP. Just got done installing 12.10 on my Lenovo Z570; this is the first time in years that I haven’t had to log back in and reflag the boot partition on every box. That is wonderful. I am in love.

Installation on an Acer Aspire One went swimmingly, as did an overlay of Edubuntu on top of 12.10 (for my nine-year old sister). There’s a whole new interface on netbooks; I wonder if Quantal detects a smaller screen size and goes with a more touch-based appearance?

Installed on my monster home server box, and again, not a single issue with having to reflag the boot partition.

I <3 Kubuntu.

Lenovo Z570 phy0 hard blocked solution

tarah 24 Comments

If you’ve had issues with wireless being grayed out and you’re unable to enable it on your Lenovo Z570 or any other box, there is a simple solution. You must reset your bios.

There’s an oddity in the bios for Lenovo Z570 machines; even after unblocking all interfaces, you can still see that phy0 is hard blocked, like below:


0: ideapad_wlan: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: ideapad_bluetooth: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
2: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
3: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no

You may be seeing errors such as:


sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill

The solution is a reboot. Hit F2 to enter bios, then F9 to reset, then F10 to save and exit. Your wireless
should be working at that point.

This is a workaround for the bug located here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/782137