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?

2

5 Answers

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!

1

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.

1

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.

I just had this problem after suspending xubuntu 20.04 with wifi disabled. When I came back, 'Enable wi-fi' was greyed out and I couldn't turn it back on.

I tried

sudo rfkill unblock all

That makes sure it's not blocked.

Then the order of steps is important:

sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager.service
sudo vim /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state

and change from false to true on line "WirelessEnabled=true". Then:

 sudo systemctl start NetworkManager.service

Then everything goes back to normal and wifi works. It seems network manager writes this state as false when it stops, but reads it when it starts, so a simple restart isn't enough.

In addition, I noticed that sometimes, despite these steps, I also needed to kill and restart nm-applet to get the options to not be grey.

pkill nm-applet
nm-applet &
disown

There is a bug to report in here somewhere!

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04 using xfce.

This command solved for me:

sudo nmcli n on

nmcli is the network manager client, n stands for networking and on means that the command must turn networking back on.

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