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Please read the question in full before marking it as duplicate, I have just installed Xubutu 14.04 on my VGNFE31H laptop

The laptop has two wifi devices.

First: The laptop has a built in wifi card intel. The wifi switch on laptop is broken and therefore the built in wifi is physically switched off and therefore I can not use it

Second: Because I can not use built in wifi card I have attached a USB wifi dongle TP LINK WNt22N in order to use wifi. This dongle does NOT have any physical switch to turn it on or off, it works on my windows without any issue

When I try rkfill list all the output is this

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: yes
1: phy1: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

However I can not enable my wifi, I have attached the screen shot as to how it is looking right now.

enter image description here

Any ideas what needs to be done ?

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  • Sorry, I guess I should've read the question carefully.
    – Mitch
    Mar 4, 2015 at 8:10

1 Answer 1

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OK so I have resolved the problem and wanted to share the solution with anyone who is facing similar issue,

I tried methods like

sudo rfkill unblock all
sudo service network-manager restart 

but did not work

also tried methods mentioned

here but did not work.

I tried to add following line to disable my internal wifi card,

iface wlan0 inet manual

to file /etc/network/interfaces then restarted network manager, it only ended up showing my internal wifi device as disabled in the menu but the USB wifi option was still disabled

finally this solution worked, I search for modules

lsmod

and apparently two modules were related for my internal wifi iwl3945 which was using iwlegacy module, I tried to unload iwlegacy but it failed since it was used by iwl3945. However unloading iwl3945 also unloaded iwlegacy as well and immediately my USB wifi starrted to work,

sudo modprobe -rv iwl3945 

But this lost its effect when machine rebooted,so to make it permanenet I have added this module in the blacklist.conf

  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

then saved the blacklist file and run the command, this command rebuilds the initial directory structure that is loaded along with kernal at boot time and does not contain blacklisted modules

  sudo update-initramfs -u

then even after reboot the iwl3945 and iwlegacy modules remain unloaded and the system only sees one USB wifi and the menu to enable wifi is available,

enter image description here

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  • For me sudo rfkill unblock all worked. However I'm still struggling to make it persistent after reboot. I'm on Debian 11. Jan 20, 2022 at 6:13

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