[Dell Vostro 1015] Turning off wi-fi with the hotkey (Fn+F11) permanently kills wi-fi

[Jeff Lane ]

Discovered during Natty cert testing on the Vostro 1530. Like the other Vostro I tried, when I turn off wireless using the hot-key combo (on this one it's Fn+F11) that's it for wireless. From that point forward there appears to be no way to turn wireless back on. The network manager always shows wireless as being "Disabled by physical switch" but no amount of hitting the hot key again and again will turn the wireless card back on.

Also tried rebooting, pulling power, and BIOS, but the wireless is gone for good as far as I can tell.

[Ara Pulido (ara)]

It seems that a very similar issue is blocking certification in a set of dells. Can you have a look?

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Additional info... this seems incredibly common to the Dell systems. All Dells I've tested so far exhibit this behaviour.

The upside is that I finally managed to get wireless turned back on on the Latitude 2120. The downside is that I had to reinstall the OS to do so.

For whatever reason, reinstalling fixed it.

So this tells me that using the hot-key to disable wireless sets a bit somewhere in the OS but from that point on, that bit can't be unset. So that may be a good clue where to start looking to resolve this, and it should resolve this issue across all the dells.

[Victor Tuson Palau (vtuson)]

I had the same experience with the dell vostro 3300, killing the dell_laptop module brought everything back alive.

sudo rmmod -f dell_laptop

if so then this is a duplicate of bug 701259

[Marc Legris (maaarc-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

@Victor

That workaround does not work, bug 701259 looks like a physical killswitch while this is a hotkey

[Colin Brown (colinwilliambrown)]

I tried returning to 10.10 after the kill switch proved permanent in 11.4. It was still stuck. Re-installing 11.4 from scratch didn't help. Could it be that something is set in the BIOS? Or could it be in my home partition (which was carried over).

Dell Inspiron 640m

[Alexandru Zbarcea (zbarcea-a)]

I have the same problem. I suggest moving importance to High. Anyone with the same Broadcom driver is unable to use WiFi. Thx

Dell Inspiron 640m

[Kenny Doerhoff (kenny-foribite)]

I do not know if this helps are not but I did find a work around.

Go into BIOS and disable the wifi then hit apply.
Enable the wifi then hit apply.
Save and reboot.

This will reset the Fn-F11 to on....

Tested with Ubuntu 11.04, full updates and no other drivers added and Dell Vostro 1015

[Chris Van Hoof (vanhoof)]

Thanks for the update Kenny!

@Marc -- Can you give the solution Kenny outlined in Comment #7 a try on your Vostro 1015?

Cheers,
Chris

[Marc Legris (maaarc-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

@Chris -- The solution inf comment #7 does not allow the wifi to come back on.

[belal (belal-kalash)]

same problem > del vostro 1014