Wireless – Fixing Wireless Disabled by Hardware Switch on Asus X550V

asusnetworkingshortcut-keyswireless

I'm using Ubuntu 13.04 and I have ASUS X550V laptop. This is my rfkill list:

0: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
1: asus-bluetooth: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
2: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: yes
3: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

Before you start going: Hey, just turn on your hardware switch, dummy… my hardware switch is Fn + F2 and it works perfectly fine on my Windows boot.
But, on my Ubuntu boot it does nothing… All the other Fn + F_ combos work (turn off the touchpad, screen turn off, screen brightness, sound) and they give some kind of visual indicator when I press it.

My lshw log:

*-network DISABLED
                description: Wireless interface
                product: AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter
                vendor: Atheros Communications Inc.
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
                logical name: wlan0
                version: 01
                serial: 24:0a:64:28:b4:25
                width: 64 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical wireless
                configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.8.0-19-generic firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
                resources: irq:17 memory:f7900000-f797ffff memory:f7980000-f798ffff

Best Answer

Is the module asus_nb_wmi loaded? Check:

lsmod | grep asus

If so, please try a driver parameter:

sudo -i
echo "options asus_nb_wmi wapf=0" > /etc/modprobe.d/asus.conf
exit

Reboot and see if the Fn+F2 behavior is changed.

If the above does not work, redo it again but replace asus_nb_wmi wapf=0 with asus_nb_wmi wapf=1, and if that does not work, replace it with asus_nb_wmi wapf=4 instead.

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