Thursday, May 13, 2010

Intel WiFi 6000 on Ubuntu 10.04

A fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 on a Dell Studio XPS 16 didn't want to enable its Intel Wireless WiFi Link 6000. Pressing the wifi touchkey didn't help.

Running rfkill list gave

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
             Soft blocked: yes
             Hard blocked: no
NetworkManager Applet reported wireless as disabled or device not ready.

I read that removing the dell_laptop kernel module might help, but it did no good in my case.

What finally did the trick for me was

sudo rfkill unblock wifi

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks it worked for me too. Dell Studio 15 laptop with an Intel 6000 a/b/g/n card - Ubuntu 10.04

Unknown said...

Do you have any idea about what to do if it's other way around?

Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes

Greg said...

@doobo Check to be sure you didn't accidentally bump the wifi switch along the side of your laptop or a button above the keyboard. Sometimes my wireless device wakes up in a bad mood, but a reboot usually fixes it.