WiFi hard blocked on linux but works on Windows

[akash-karnatak]

F12 is my wifi key, I have already tried toggling it several times. Toggling it in BIOS, in Windows, in Ubuntu. Even with different modifier keys.

[akash-karnatak]

Yo guys, I have found this

$ cat /sys/module/rt2800pci/drivers/pci\:rt2800pci/0000\:0a\:00.0/ieee80211/phy0/rfkill0/hard
1

I guess changing the 1 to 0 will remove my hard block. But I can't edit this file, even with the root privileges. Why?

[jeremy31]

That file is read only as it is read from BIOS, only the BIOS can change it. I have an idea that may or may not work and I doubt it can hurt anything, we can edit grub to pass some info to BIOS at boot

gedit admin:///etc/default/grub

Go to the line with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Add acpi_osi='Windows 2017' inside the quotes so that it is

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi='Windows 2017'"

Then do

sudo update-grub

Reboot

This should make the BIOS think that a Windows 10 version is being loaded rather than the default in Ubuntu of not responding to the BIOS acpi_osi inquiry

[akash-karnatak]

It didn;t work . But when I looked for other kernel parameters then I found this,

        rfkill.default_state=
		0	"airplane mode".  All wifi, bluetooth, wimax, gps, fm,
			etc. communication is blocked by default.
		1	Unblocked.

	rfkill.master_switch_mode=
		0	The "airplane mode" button does nothing.
		1	The "airplane mode" button toggles between everything
			blocked and the previous configuration.
		2	The "airplane mode" button toggles between everything
			blocked and everything unblocked.

which looked promising. I tried them with a bunch of different combinations, like

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash rfkill.default_state=1"

but either it was still hard blocked, or my wifi module(rt2800pci) didn't load during boot. Even when I manually loaded rt2800pci it didn't detect any wireless interface(`rfkill list` was empty).

[jeremy31]

I have found a few things but we need to see if it works in a now unsupported Ubuntu release, the ISO can be found at https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/rele...ktop-amd64.iso
Supposedly there was a change in 2015 that caused these problems

[akash-karnatak]

I have downloaded the ISO and flashed it to a USB.

[praseodym]

You could try this one, that worked up to kernel 4.4-143

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms
wget https://media-cdn.ubuntu-de.org/forum/attachments/06/23/5641297-RT3290_u16_v3.tar.gz
tar xvf 5641297-RT3290_u16_v3.tar.gz
cd RT3290_u16
tar xvf src.tar.gz
./compile.sh
sudo ./install.sh
sudo cp firmware/rt3290.bin /lib/firmware 
echo "blacklist rt2800pci" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rt2800pci.conf

Worked without error?

[jeremy31]

I have downloaded the ISO and flashed it to a USB.

Does it work with no hard block?

[akash-karnatak]

Nope, it's hard blocked even in Ubuntu 14. Also my WiFi works out of the box on OpenBSD 6.8. I guess theirs some problem with rt2800pci driver.

[akash-karnatak]

Ok I tried that with linux kernel 4.1 and it did compile. But I cannot access GUI on that kernel and `iwlist eno1 scan` does not yield any scan results.