wifi totally desappeared Nadia EEE PC

[Daniel B.]

Using Mint for a few weeks on my old EEE pc I suddenly "lost" wireless connection.
I don't see any trace of wifi driver or adapter.
I suppose some driver is not recognized since the last update. It look like I have no wireless hardware on my eee pc. I even reinstalled Mint.
I attached dmesg and lspci if it can help.
Thanks in advance

[AlbertP]

I agree that there is no wifi adapter visible. This is not a driver matter, since it first needs to detect the wifi card before a driver can be loaded. I think it's probably a hardware failure. Please check if the card inside the laptop (likely a Mini PCIe card) is properly inserted.

The person from the previous topic had an Atheros wifi card visible in inxi -Gx output, which you don't have. You have an Atheros chip, AR8121/AR8113/AR8114, but that is the wired ethernet.
martka had an AR8152 v2.0 for the wired ethernet, so that must be a different laptop than yours. I suppose your laptop is a bit older than the 1015BX of martka.

[eanfrid]

As for many laptops, there is a keyboard shortcut to switch on/off wifi. Obviously, if switched off, the wifi interface cannot be used. On my Asus netbook (1000HE), the shortcut is FN+F2 (FN is the blue key to access special functions and integrated num keypad). You can also check in the BIOS if the wifi interface is still enabled.

[AlbertP]

@ eanfrid: Even if the wifi would be switched off, it would not disappear completely from the system and that is what happened here. Bluetooth devices do so, but I have never seen it on PCI Express wifi chips. Also, if a Bluetooth device has disappeared because it is disabled, its driver loading at boot is still seen in the dmesg. And no trace of any wifi card/driver is seen there, so what we're seeing is certainly different from a normal "disabled" device.

[eanfrid]

To be sure, I just switched on my netbook and disabled wifi, bluetooth and card-reader in the BIOS. None of them is further detected by the kernel while booting Linux (and no driver is loaded). If I hit FN+F2, wifi comes in and is listed by lspci once drivers are loaded. If switched back to off, wifi disappears totally from the hardware list (but the drivers are not unloaded)

[AlbertP]

Ok, I was unaware that wifi could work that way too (it is a PCIe device at you, so in lspci, not lsusb?).

@ Daniel B. Please run this in terminal and post the output:

Code: Select all

rfkill list

[eanfrid]

@AlbertP: I edited my previous post for more details. Yes it is an integrated pci-e device.

[Daniel B.]

Shame on me !!!
eanfrid you're right FN+F2 !!!
I waste hours. Thanks to all for your answers.