How do I fix a «Wireless is disabled by hardware switch» error?
You can assume it is a hardware notice: some notebooks have a slider at the left of right of the casing. And some have a keyboard combo (Fn + F3 on my machine). and do not forget BIOS: wifi might be disabled there.
On an HP Envy laptop if you shutdown with wifi disabled by the hardware switch (Fn F12), then it will be disabled when you boot and network manager will give up trying after 60 seconds, and on each subsequent reboot, whether or not you re-enabled wireless while you were up or did a sudo service network-manager restart .
6 Answers 6
Same happened to me, simply resolved with:
rfkill list all showed some devices on soft block.
This is why Linux fails to hit a bigger audience. stupidity like this. I run dual boot. In Ubuntu I was able to accidentally disable my wireless hardware completely. it wouldn’t even reenable in windows — so I changed something below the OS abstraction. Seriously? I event spent $30 on a USB wireless trying to fix this. Linux, I loath you but love you too. Thank you @Luca for this solution to my problem. Give me your address and I’ll send you this Micro USB Wireless device.
I had the same problem just after clicking «disable wireless» because a network kept trying to reconnect that required authentication (kept popping up and I was trying to work). Then wireless also stopped working in windows and not until I did rfkill unblock all AND restarted was the Enable Wireless option available again
No. Issue is not Ubuntu or driver, but we are the reason, see a simple solution here: unix.stackexchange.com/a/507631/189124
There are two types of radio kill switches: ‘hard’ (or physical) and ‘soft’ (software). The rfkill list command will tell you whether either (or both) of these are set for any connected radio devices.
If your wireless card shows «Hard blocked: yes», then a physical switch on your laptop case is turned off. Turn it on.
If your card shows «Soft blocked: yes», then you can turn it back on by running rfkill unblock where is replaced by the number from the rfkill list command.
There is a bug in network-manager, where if you disabled wifi by right-clicking on the applet and un-checking «Enable Wireless», then the menu option becomes grayed out and can no longer be re-enabled. This persists after rebooting. It looks like NM is soft-blocking the wireless card when you disable it (which is a reasonable thing to do), but then graying out the menu item because it is soft-blocked (which is not a reasonable thing to do).
DESCRIPTION
rfkill lists, enabling and disabling wireless devices.
The command «list» output format is deprecated and maintained for backward compatibility only. The new output format is the default when no command is specified or when the option —output is used.
The default output is subject to change. So whenever possible, you should avoid using default outputs in your scripts. Always explicitly define expected columns by using the —output option together with a columns list in environments where a stable output is required.
OPTIONS
COMMANDS
list [id|type . ]
List the current state of all available devices. The command output format is deprecated, see the DESCRIPTION section. It is a good idea to check with list command id or type scope is appropriate before setting block or unblock. Special all type string will match everything. Use of multiple ID or type arguments is supported. Possible types are all, , bluetooth, , wimax, wwan, gps, fm, nfc.
block id|type [. ]
unblock id|type [. ]
Enable the corresponding device. If the device is hard-blocked, for example via a hardware switch, it will remain unavailable though it is now soft-unblocked.
toggle id|type [. ]
EXAMPLE
rfkill --output ID,TYPE
rfkill block all
rfkill unblock wlan
rfkill block bluetooth uwb wimax wwan gps fm nfc
AUTHORS
rfkill was originally written by Johannes Berg and Marcel Holtmann . The code has been later modified by Sami Kerola and Karel Zak for the util-linux project.
This manual page was written by Darren Salt for the Debian project (and may be used by others).
SEE ALSO
REPORTING BUGS
AVAILABILITY
The rfkill command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
Powered by archmanweb, using mandoc for the conversion of manual pages.
The website is available under the terms of the GPL-3.0 license, except for the contents of the manual pages, which have their own license specified in the corresponding Arch Linux package.
How can I bring back disappeared or hard-blocked wifi on linux?
On my HP6370b laptop the wifi connection disappeared. There is no icon for wifi connection, the network setting still shows the previously used wifi connection but it does not connect to it. How can I get the wifi connection back?
2 Answers 2
You can block RF (radio-frequency) devices of your computer in two different levels:
The difference is that the soft-block is available on all computers and it can be turned on and off by some appropriate commands. The hard-block, on the other hand, requires some more direct change on the computer.
For example, the Wifi or the Bluetooth devices can be disabled
- in you BIOS/UEFI settings
- by a hotkey combination like Ctrl+F12 (see you computer’s manual for the exact combination)
- by a physical switch on you hardware
There is a really useful command line tool in linux called rfkill . It lists and lets you manipulate all the radio-based devices of your computer and works like this:
rfkill $ rfkill ID TYPE DEVICE SOFT HARD 0 bluetooth hci0 unblocked unblocked 1 wlan phy0 unblocked unblocked 2 wlan hp-wifi unblocked unblocked 3 bluetooth hp-bluetooth unblocked unblocked This list shows that the computer has four wireless devices, 0 and 3 are bluetooth and 1 and 2 are wifi. At this stage they are all unblocked, that is, all of them can be used.
When I had the wifi-issue I mentioned in the title of this question, the values in the HARD column were all blocked .
Unblocking hard blocks
In order to unblock hard blocks, you need to change back your UEFI/BIOS settings, apply the appropriate hotkey or use the physical switch. On my HP HP6370b laptop the physical switch is a touch-button right above the F6 and F7 function keys of the built-in keyboard. It looks like a wifi-symbol but it is responsible for Bluetooth as well. Its color can be either blue or yellow. Blue means it is turned ON, yellow means OFF. You just have to touch that shiny symbol to toggle the state. When it goes blue, the rfkill command will display unblocked for each devices in their HARD column. Done.
Unblocking soft blocks
If the device is not hard-blocked, it still can be soft-blocked. In order to unblock it, you can use a command like this:
where 2 is the ID of the device in the output of rfkill .
As opposed to the listing, for toggling a setting you need root access. That’s why I used sudo . When you unblocked the soft-blocks of all the devices then rfkill displays unblocked in both the HARD and the SOFT columns in each line. Done.
It shouldn’t be necessary to reboot after unblocking the RF devices but you may need to restart some services. Maybe it is easier just to reboot if things don’t work yet.
In my case, the problem was that I did not know what that wifi symbol does above the function keys. We normally use this laptop as a desktop replacement and the lid is always closed. Recently we had to move the laptop and probably we hard-blocked the RF devices by accident.