Just a quick post, about an annoyance with my Toshiba Satellite laptop. Maybe it will help someone, but the wireless card had no power because the “hardware switch” was turned off. This laptop has no power switch. The function keys which turn it on/off in Windows do not seem to work in Ubuntu. The solution was found originally in the post below, but to save some time, the solution for me was to power the laptop off, take out batter for 30 seconds, holding down the power button. Then when the laptop is powered back on, the wireless in Ubuntu works. Hopefully this won’t need to be repeated over and over, but at least its working now.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/106568/my-wireless-has-suddenly-became-disabled-by-hardware-switch-bios-rfkill-fnf8