Yesterday, my boss asked me if I could install ubuntu gutsy on his old unika laptop. Almost everything went fine, but the wifi. Even the kill switch wasn’t working and, typing in a terminal:

iwconfig eth1

always outputs “radio: off”. I had also in dmesg this error:

ipw2200: failed to send TX_POWER command 

So, the base of the problem was to have a working kill switch button. Here what I did:

sudo modprobe rfkill
sudo modprobe rfkill_input

then I hit the killswitch button and, yay ! it worked.
To make this permanent I had to put these lines into /etc/modules :

rfkill
rfkill_input

and to have the led working, I created a file in /etc/modprobe.d called ipw2200 where I put this line:

options led=1

et voila
The only annoying thing left is that the wifi is always desactivated at boot.