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I recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 16.04 on my sister's Dell Inspiron 3521. After installing I noticed that the WiFi adapter won't turn on. I could see a Enable WiFi option on the tray icon but when I check that nothing happens. When I do an lspci I see this:

02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

I also checked in my BIOS to see if its disabled through that but I couldn't even find an option there to do that.

When I try rfkill list all I see:

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

I'm guessing this is the reason why its not working. How do I resolve this?

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  • Do you have a hard (button) wifi turn-off switch? Mar 10, 2018 at 3:48
  • Nope, I do not. Mar 10, 2018 at 3:55
  • Dell Inspiron 3521 don't have a hard button but maybe you turn WiFi off by pressing Fn + F2. It's unlikely but you can update BIOS. Mar 10, 2018 at 5:54
  • @PabloBianchi Fn + F2 worked. I'm such a doofus. I didn't realize that those would work here as well. Thanks again! Mar 10, 2018 at 6:12
  • @electrophile don't worry, you learn something new :) I'll add this as an answer. Mar 10, 2018 at 14:29

1 Answer 1

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Dell Inspiron 3521 don't have a hard button to turn WiFi off/on.

Instead toggle by pressing Fn + F2:

image of the keyboard

The output of rfkill list all you provided is particularly useful to detect the problem wasn't elsewhere.

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