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tacozmeister
Asked: 2012-08-28 12:10:31 +0800 CST

Manually re-enable wireless and bluetooth

  • 772

So, today, I decided to turn off bluetooth to save battery power. When I did so, it did everything like normal. Whatever. But whenever I want to re-enable Wifi and Bluetooth, it just has "Enable Wireless" and "Enable bluetooth" grayed out in the respective things on the top-right of the desktop. I am using 12.04 Precise Pangolin on a Dell laptop that has never had wireless problems before. Clicking the grayed-out part does nothing. Re-logging and restarting has no effect, and I'm on an account that has full administrative permission.

My attempts:

~$ sudo dmesg | grep wlan0
[19.960211] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready

.

~$ sudo dmesg | grep blue

[[nothing]]

What do I do to manually re-enable wireless and bluetooth?

12.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found that under my "Bluetooth settings", I couldn't click anything and it said it was disabled by hardware switch.

    So, I looked at my keyboard, and there's kind of this radio tower over "F2" in the color of the FN button. So I pressed FN-F2 and it re-enabled wireless and bluetooth.

    I don't even remember pressing that button ever before, but I pressed it, and it worked.

    Future viewers: If you see that your wireless AND bluetooth are disabled, and you're on a laptop, press FN-(wireless button, for example mine was F2). This will likely solve your problems.

    What a simple solution. Really surprised this solution hasn't come up in any other Ask pages I've seen so far.

    If this doesn't work, try the console commands:

    sudo service wireless start
sudo service bluetooth start

    as those returned neutral or favorable results for me, regardless of the button being down or not.

    • 6

  2. I installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS few days ago (I was using Mint 10 earlier) and I have identical problem.

    The icon says bluetooth is on, but there aren't any options and in bluetooth settings it says it's disabled.

    I found the solution working for me:

    sudo service bluetooth restart

    I simply restarted the service, and it started working immediately!

    My laptop is Samsung NP300E5A, Intel Centrino Wireless-N 130 (WiFi & BT).

    • 3

  3. Try this:

    For networking:

    sudo /etc/init.d/networking start

    For the bluetooth:

    sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

    If the above do not work, you have to check if the kernel recognises the modules properly (which I assume it does, since you have used it before) by using:

    dmesg | grep blue

    and

    dmesg | grep wlan0
    • 0