Why is the Enable Wireless button greyed out and unselectable?

The 'enable wireless' button on the top right is greyed out and I am unable to click it and my wireless won't work anymore. What can I do to fix this?

Solution 1:

You can try that:

1. turn on wireless switch
2. in a terminal windows execute the below command sudo rfkill unblock wifi
3. reboot
4. in a terminal windows execute the below command sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
5. enable wireless in NetworkManager

Worked for me!

Solution 2:

After multiple reboots, I still could not get "Enable Wi-Fi" to be selected on Ubuntu 16.04 on my PC. After some searching, I found the following procedure solved my problem.

1. sudo rfkill list

   this is to find out if your wireless device is hardware/software blocked

2. sudo rfkill unblock all

   this is to unblock every wireless devices, including the WiFi and bluetooth (if there is one)

3. sudo vim /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state

   and change from false to true on line "WirelessEnabled=true"or something like that. This seemed to be the key step for fixing my problem; it appeared that network-manager inquired this file during reboot to restore its state, i.e., if Wi-Fi was grayed out before the reboot, it will stay grayed out after reboot.

4. sudo reboot

sudo systemctl restart network-manager.service wasn't able to get network-manager to use the modified state file.

Hope this helps someone.

Solution 3:

if your hardware switch is on or if you do not have a hardware switch in the first place,

during boot-up go to the BIOS menu and check whether the Enable Wireless at startup is Enabled.