Manually re-enable wireless and bluetooth

Question

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?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 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).

Comments

[tacozmeister]

for networking, it returned "Rather than invoking init scripts through . . . . " and gave me a suggestion of a command to do instead. I did that, and it said "rejected send message, 1 matched rules;" and a bunch more AKA, doesn't work

[tacozmeister]

Okay. So, "sudo service wireless start" returned "networking stop/waiting". I dunno what that means. And "dmesh | grep wlan0" returned "[ 19.960211] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready" bold was in red Bluetooth is allegedly working on the console. 'sudo service bluetooth start start: job is already running: bluetooth'

[NlightNFotis]

Are you able to use wireless connectivity now?

[tacozmeister]

No. Bluetooth is still disabled, too. According to the thingie in the top-right

[NlightNFotis]

Can u type dmesg | grep wlan and dmesg | grep bluetooth and paste the output in your question?

[tacozmeister]

OH! Okay. Well, we didn't need any command line. I found out how to fix it. Going to add my own answer xD

[NlightNFotis]

Nice man, glad to see that your issue was solved! And have to note that I had faced issues like that in the past successfully. It is surprising that it didn't strike me this time.

[tacozmeister]

Yeah, I know, it is such an obvious answer to such a simple question. We really overthought it. I did look it up though. Apparently, in Ubuntu 12.04 (and this is apparently not very common, I saw maybe 1 or 2 forum posts about it), turning off bluetooth switches the hardware switch for the wireless button, because I NEVER pressed that button. It may be my computer model or something. But all I clicked was bluetooth and bam. Whatever. Problem solved. Hope I help someone else quicker than I helped myself xD

[NlightNFotis]

Mark your answer as accepted so people can see the solution if they face the same problem.