Wifi switch disabled

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Kelse

Wifi switch disabled

Post by Kelse »

I installed LMDE 4 on an old Acer laptop (Acer Travelmate 291LMi) which has a hardware switch to turn Wifi on/off. At the moment Wifi doesn't work as the switch doesn't work anymore (it did under Windows XP).

I tried:
rfkill list wifi
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
and
sudo rfkill unblock all
- but this didn't help

I found some older discussions on this problem, mostly Ubuntu-related.
Here (https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Archiv/acer-wmi/), for example, it says that under Ubuntu the first version of the module to solve the problem was acerhk, followed by acer_acpi, then acer_wmi (kernel 2.6.26 onwards). From Ubuntu 12.04 onwards, wistron_btns was recommended.

I couldn't find any newer discussions, and anyway, LMDE is not based on Ubuntu.

So can someone help and give me an idea what would be the best thing to do?

(There is also an ‘ACPI error could not enable sleepbutton event’ - after grub has disappeared - but so far this doesn't seem to cause any problems.)
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
sleeper12
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Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by sleeper12 »

You might be able to carefully pry the switch button off with a small screwdriver, then toggle it on with a pen tip. If not, just buy a usb wifi adapter that works on linux.
Kelse

Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by Kelse »

I'm afraid you are right, a wifi adapter might be the only solution.
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Pjotr
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Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by Pjotr »

Can you toggle WiFi in the BIOS? If so, poke it a bit and see what happens.
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Kelse

Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by Kelse »

No, I can't (there's not much one can do in the bios)
Lanser

Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by Lanser »

Hi Kelse. I had this issue with an Acer and a Lenovo many years ago. As I remember the Acer could be enabled by shutting the machine completly down, removing the battery, setting the WiFi Switch to on, re-installing the battery and re-booting. But the only way I could ever get the Lenovo active was to swap out the hard drive with another drive running Win XP, Set the WiFi switch to On, test, then shut down and swap the drive back to the Linux HDD.

I never tried toggling the WiFi setting by taking the BIOS back to default, but changing the switch position and doing a reset may also work.
Just have to remember to go back into the BIOS and select your preferences again.

EDIT: Just had a read of your machine spec. I thought you had one of the sliding WiFi switch models.
Think I would try BIOS reset first to see if that also resets the WiFi Card State.

hope this helps

Lanser
Kelse

Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by Kelse »

Hi and thank you all for your help. Unfortunately so far nothing I tried solved the problem.
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axisofevil
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Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by axisofevil »

On laptops there is usually a Fn key to toggle the wifi on/off - something like Fn3 or there-abouts.
Kelse

Re: Wifi switch disabled

Post by Kelse »

Yes, but this is about the 'sliding switch' (as Lanser wrote) on the left side of the laptop (coupled with an led). Searching the internet I came (contrary to my first post) to the conclusion that the real problem might be the missing 'acerhk' module as it seems that 'acerhk' was the only module to support the Acer Travelmate 290 series. It seems to have been part of the Debian packages until 2012 (? I'm not sure about that). I found newer sources (e.g. https://launchpad.net/~gruenertee/+arch ... ntu/acerhk) but didn't succeed in setting the module to work (which is no surprise as I'm no expert and don't know what to change for that).
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