Ubuntu – Dell XPS 14 9434 laptop Wifi Adapter Disabled and I can’t enable it

driversnetworkingwireless

I have a Dell XPS 13 9343 Laptop onto which I have installed Linux alongside the Windows 8.1 OS it came with. This worked fine first time but last night after I caused a Kernel Panic I decided to reinstall knowing how easy and quick it was.

God was I wrong, now the Wifi will not work and I can't seem to fix it. According to 'lshw' this is the current status of the adapter AFTER installing the proprietary drivers from the System Setting GUI.

   *-network DISABLED   
   description: Wireless interface
   product: BCM4352 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
   vendor: Broadcom Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
   logical name: wlan0
   version: 03
   serial: c4:8e:8f:f7:fc:5b
   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) latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg
   resources: irq:19 memory:f7200000-f7207fff memory:f7000000-f71fffff

Best Answer

I seem to be solving my own problems after posting a lot these days. Though I am not sure exactly what I did that fixed it, here is everything I did as reference.

  • Removed and Purged the Drivers entirely, rebooted to be sure.
  • sudo rfkill unblock all and other commands associated with this (google is full of them) eg: Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers
  • I could not find any other drivers interfering with the Wifi so ruled this out.
  • Finally I found a post mentioning gksu gedit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and changing a value from false to true
  • Finally restart the NM sudo service network-manager restart

These last 2 steps were what I was missing but I'm not sure what else I did that contributed.

This page also had lots of useful info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1411216

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