wifi disappeared completely last night on a Debina Jessie laptop.
Now the wifi access point at home is a bit flaky. Every now and then we
have to reset it.
I run jessie on my laptop, and upgrade it every few days, so it's
reasonably up-to-date. The laptop is an ASUS 1000H (or HE? I forget) --
the first of the EEEPC's that was completely Linux-compatible without the
use of proprietary drivers.
So when I came home tonight, wifi appeared to be down, and "4133" (my
SSID) was not in the list of SSIDs my laptop said was up. I reset the
wifi access point.
4133 did not appear. I wished I knew how to get the network manager
(that's the component that manages the wifi connection in XFCE, right?)
to rescan and look for wifi access points again. It has no trouble
finding ny neighbour's access points, but not mine. I verify that the
wifi access point is indeed up by accessing it with an Android tablet.
I think -- maybe I should ask it to shut down wifi altogether (using the
network manager's menu, and then ask it to turn it on again. Maybe then
it will rescan.
But instead, after turning it off, the item has vanished from the menu,
and I can find no way to get it back.
OK. Or rather, KO. Evidently something has got into a state.
I shut them machine down -- complete power down and reboot.
Upon logging in, no wifi -- no wifi at all, not even the usual list of
locked SSIDs I could try in vain to connect to.
I reboot again, holding F2 to get to the BIOS.
Indeed, the WLAN device is disabled. I enable ig, use F10 to save and
quit.
It gets me back to the splash page that invites me to press F2 to
configure the BIOS.
I press F2 again, and verify that WLAN is indeed enabled -- I seem to
have done that right.
I boot Debian wheezy, using grub2.
once I log in, there's no wifi.
When I reboot and check the BIOS again, the WLAN device is again disabled.
It looks as if somewhere Linux has got the idea that wifi is supposed to
be off, and upon boot it tells the BIOS to disable the WLAN device. And
then the network manager thinks I don't have a wifi device and refuses to
give me any options to turn it on again.
How do I get out of this mess? Presumably there's some configuration
file I can edit....
Meanwhile, the other wifi devices in the house are still working just
fine.
-- hendrik
P.S. Something like this happened to me last summer when I was still
running wheezy/testing, and editing thBIOS configuration was all I needed
to get things working again. It did seem that the network manager shut
off wifi in the BIOS to so stop wifi. But last summer turning it on in
the BIOS was enough to get it back. It's almost as if the network
manager has remembered my request to turn off wifi and, upon reboot,
turns of the BIOS again, thereupon refusing to believe there's a wifi
device.
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