I need to disable access to the internet on my install of Ubuntu. How do I completely *remove* the wireless drivers?

Question

I have a dual boot of windows 7 and Ubuntu. I want the entire device completely unable to access the internet wirelessly. (But able to access it wired.)

My first idea was to remove the wireless card drivers, and I have already removed the wireless card drivers on the windows 7 partition. That was dead simple. But I can't figure out how to do it for the Ubuntu install.

I don't want a friend to install users of different access level, or attempt some "parental controls," or any nonsense like that. I just want to completely disable wireless internet on this device. Activating "Airplane mode" is not a suitable solution.

Answer 1

The drivers are built into the kernel; I don't believe it's possible to remove them without re-compiling the kernel. There may be a way to disable them; not sure.

I'd suggest physically removing the card.

Note that people will still be able to insert USB WiFi cards, whether you remove the drivers or the internal card.

Answer 2

1. Check you wireless device with lspci -nn

2. To prevent the driver from loading use: 'echo "blacklist xxx" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf', where xxx is your driver name. It will blacklist your driver

3. If you later want to re enable it: 'sudo sed -i '/^xxx/ d' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf', it will remove the blacklisting.

Please don't use the beginning and ending '' when using these commands.

Hope it helps.