Wireless always disabled (either by Ubuntu or hardware switch) - Dell L502X (12.04)

Question

This is the most frustrating bug I've ever ran into on Ubuntu. This was not a problem with 11.10 or even 12.04 betas. When I boot up the wireless is always blocked, whether by a hardware switch (Fn-F2 on my laptop) or by the option in Ubuntu. Occasionally I fool around with fn-f2 in different scenarios and I can get it working. However, any time afterwards when I reboot the problem comes back.

I've looked into many of the other answers and tried the solutions (rfkill, rmmod, etc) to no avail.

We need more hardware information to help you, can you look at this question and then edit your question adding the information. — Jorge Castro, Jul 12 '12 at 15:14

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 29 '12 at 20:28

1

You said you've tried rfkill, but this worked for me,

http://www.dkvermalinux.in/2012/05/ubuntu-1204-lts-wifi-problem-hardware.html

answered May 29 '12 at 20:28

Vasudev

11

This seems to have gotten me half way there, it's no longer being reported as soft blocked. However, I then had to completely disable networking and re-enable in order to get Wireless working again. – Andy E May 30 '12 at 11:27

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 26 '13 at 14:07

After trying all the suggestions I have seen here, I was about to give up but I happened to be installing a wifi dongle on my raspberry pi (a single board computer running linux). The instructions I found for that machine was to add the following lines to /etc/network/interfaces file. After saving the file and reboot, my Ubuntu machine now was turning on the wifi and all is good.

after the existing lines:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

add this:

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan inet dhcp
   wpa-ssid "yourSSID"
   wpa-psk  "yourpassphrase"

Wireless always disabled (either by Ubuntu or hardware switch) - Dell L502X (12.04)

2 Answers2