Ubuntu
broadcom-sta package

Ubuntu 14.04: Wifi disabled after suspend

Asked by Jean

I recently bought a new HP pavilion 15 (has windows 8) and installed (dual boot) a fresh version of ubuntu 14.04 (64bit).

After installation, the built-in wifi wasn't working so i used a usb wifi stick to connect to Internet. Few minutes later, i tried the built-in wifi and it started working fine.

However i noticed that it gets disabled after i suspend and re-relogin. The wifi switch gets greyed and can't click it anymore and i see the message "wifi is disabled by hardware switch), although there's no hardware switch in this HP.

The only solution to get the wifi back is by restart (and that's really annoying).

I spent days trying solutions that i found for similar problems in this forum and other websites but with no luck.

The sudo rfkill list displays the following:

2: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
3: phy1: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
4: brcmwl-0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: yes
The unblock command doesn't change anything.

(wifi works well on windows)

Please help me find a solution for this problem.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

If you run:

sudo rfkill unblock all

Is it OK?

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#2

Try booting into Windows and use the Fn-Fx (whatever it is) keys to disable and re-enable the Wlan device. Then reboot into Ubuntu. Do you still see the "Hard blocked: yes" status?

If yes, then please follow steps 1 to 6 in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WirelessTroubleshootingProcedure and paste the output of step 2 into this question document that you have already created.

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Jean (john-assy) said : 		#3

sudo rfkill unblock all does't change anything at all.

And booting into windows doesn't change anything too. Actually as i mentioned, whenever i reboot (ubuntu), the wifi works well, but it just gets disabled on suspend, then i will have to reboot again to make it work.

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#4

Switching power management off for your WLAN device might help

What is the output of
sudo lshw -C network
iwconfig

Switching power mgmt off is done with a command like
sudo iwconfig brcmwl-0 power off

Another possibility would be trying to unload and reload the WLAN driver when going into / out of suspend, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2004690 (you have to find out the driver for your device first).

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Jean (john-assy) said : 		#5

This is the result:

sudo lshw -C network

  *-network
       description: Wireless interface
       product: BCM43142 802.11b/g/n
       vendor: Broadcom Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0
       logical name: wlan1
       version: 01
       serial: 74:29:af:ea:ef:61
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.248 (r487574) ip=192.168.1.104 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg
       resources: irq:18 memory:c6100000-c6107fff
  *-network
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:09:00.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 08
       serial: d0:bf:9c:97:fa:32
       size: 10Mbit/s
       capacity: 100Mbit/s
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half firmware=rtl8106e-2_0.0.1 04/23/13 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s
       resources: irq:65 ioport:4000(size=256) memory:c6004000-c6004fff memory:c6000000-c6003fff

iwconfig
eth0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions.

wlan1 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:"HUAWEI-E5220-aef6"
          Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 14:B9:68:09:AE:F6
          Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#6

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.