Tuesday, November 22, 2011

How to re-enable wireless in Ubuntu 11.10

Yesterday while checking settings on my laptop i accidentally switched the wireless lan off -Stupid me- i thought, but as i tried to switch it back on it didn't work!
Wtf??? was my first thought, i clicked on the enable button but nothing happened, i also notice that the 'Airplane mode' button was enabled, so i switch that one off and tried the wlan again button without success.
So i put on my Google and dived into the net, within minutes i got an answer and a few minutes later i had everything working again, there were a few option how to deal with this, but i managed to fix my problem using only two commands, see graphic below:

To check if wireless is blocked, we use the 'rfkill list' command, in my case, '0: hp-wifi' is the interesting part of the output. When wireless was blocked it showed 'Soft blocked: yes' (sorry, screenshot was made after everything was fixed) in order to unblock it enter the next command 'rfkill unblock wifi'.
In my case that's all i had to do, no reboot, no nothing else, nada, there were other, more complicated methods to get around this issue but probably because of my laptop's hardware i didn't have to do anything else (lucky me!!)




11 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot, been trying to fix this issue for hours now. Now it works again.

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  2. Hi tagergaard, thanks for leaving a comment and i'm glad to know this post helped you out, spread the word!! :-)

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  3. wow.. that solve it for me too... thanks... any idea why it happens?... I had never experience this issue before

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  4. Hi Anonymous, thanks for your comment, glad it worked out for you too, afaik it has something to do with drivers being blacklisted after upgrading to 11.10 but don't believe me this, if you really want to know you can always ask mighty Google for enlightenment :-)

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  5. Thank you very very much!!! Your post solve my problem also!!

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  6. Glad to be of help xavi and thanks for your comment :-)

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  7. hey this is my first time using the terminal how sould i input the command?

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  8. If you're too lazy to type you can copy and paste the commands from my post :-)

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  9. Thank you for the quick fix, plus I learned a new command. :)
    I had to re-enable, because after unchecking "Enable Wireless", the option to re-enable was gone. Your commands were spot on.

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  10. Thanks, Thanks, Thanks.

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  11. sory but i got this answer


    jithu# rfkill unblock wif
    Bogus unblock argument 'wif'.

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