I am on an HP Envy m4 running 18.04 and unable to turn on wifi. In the notification bar in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, I read "Airplane mode on" and "use hardware switch to turn off." This is a recent problem -- I have had a working installation for some time. The only recent updates on my machine have been system updates of libparted, firefox.
We see here that there is indeed a hard block on wireless:
> rfkill list all
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
There is a wifi switch on my laptop's F12 key, but as I understand there are no linux drivers for this, so there is no response for this button.
I have reset the BIOS and have checked that the leads of the wireless card were properly connected. When I run Ubuntu on liveUSB the same issue persists. Solutions to similar questions using modprobe have not worked for me. Ideally, I would put in a new wireless card and see what happens, but I'd like to try and rule out other problems before I do this.
1 Answer
"Hard blocked" means that there is a PHYSICAL SWITCH in the "OFF" position. You can't fix it via software.
Others have had this problem, see
From the solution linked above:
3I am certain that my keyboard is different than yours, but I have to press the "fn" key at the bottom of the keyboard and the "F12" key at the same time. This will turn my wifi off and on. You may have to use a different key with the fn key.
