Wireless network can not be switched on/off

If you press the wireless button on the laptop it does indeed disable the wifi radio... You can verify if you type dmesg from a command prompt. The light will not go out...

But I think the button should switch wifi radio on/off. In Windows it does; there the respective light is on only when WLAN connection is on, I suppose. (I haven't used such a connection yet, but the light does not respond to the button and I tried it outside a wireless network.) User manual of my laptop says about the wireless communication button/indicator: "Press to enable/disable the wireless function. Indicates the status of wireless LAN communication."

Some dmesg lines that may relate to this problem:
[ 39.698577] input: b43-phy0 as /devices/virtual/input/input11
[ 40.931334] Registered led device: b43-phy0:tx
[ 40.931776] Registered led device: b43-phy0:rx
[ 40.932118] Registered led device: b43-phy0:radio
[ 836.900095] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x55 on isa0060/serio0).
[ 836.900103] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes 55 <keycode>' to make it known.
[ 836.900215] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x55 on isa0060/serio0).
[ 836.900218] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes 55 <keycode>' to make it known.
[ 1056.178269] b43-phy0: Radio turned on by software

Pressing the button does turn on/off the radio, your right though the light doesn't work the same way as it does in windows. When your connected to a wireless connection the light will flicker when the laptop is sending/receiving data. I'm not sure what the reasoning behind making the button work that way was but it is nice to see when the laptop is communicating.

This seems to be a duplicate of bug #156997, can you confirm?
I changed the status back to incomplete as it seems a little more appropriate then invalid

Could you also please indicate what kind of Acer laptop you have?

I had forgotten that I had reported about this before. Yes, it is a duplicate and I am using the same laptop.

Just as a side note, you can use ndiswrapper for your network driver so you can use the windows drivers (the LED light and button will work just as it does on windows)...

The HOW-TO is a little outdated but I believe it still applies
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper

The only thing you will have to remember to do is add 'ssb' and 'b43' to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. As soon as you do this and you reboot you will no longer be using the b43 drivers.

Thanks for the driver hint, Mr Richard Seguin. I am going to try that.

$ lspci | grep Network
06:05.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

$ lspci -n | grep 06:05.0
06:05.0 0280: 14e4:4318 (rev 02)

I installed a driver from source number 43 listed in http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.php?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,list_b/

I got this far:

$ ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5a : driver installed
 device (14E4:4318) present (alternate driver: ssb)

Thereafter I ran these (chapter 3.5.):
$sudo depmod -a
$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Couldn't see any problem in "tail /var/log/messages", but there is no wlan0 in output of ifconfig and iwconfig.
There is not Wireless connection listed in Network Settings dialog, either.

The switch in front of my computer does not affect the led beside it now either.

Richard Seguin, now I can see wlan0 in output of ifconfig and iwconfig. But the switch, or at least the LED does not work like in Windows.

I tried to remove the driver that I installed by Ndiswrapper, but I can't install the original driver anymore; hardware drivers list is empty in the dialog I opened from the system menu so I can't enable the driver.