On 25 April 2015 at 11:18, Timothy Murphy <gayleard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Tim wrote: > >> On Sat, 2015-04-25 at 01:22 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote: >>> Airplane mode? Is there such a thing on a laptop? >> >> I would have thought so, people do use laptops when they travel. > > I'm running Fedora/KDE, and I don't see anything called "Airplane mode" > (or Airplane anything) in KNetworkManager. > Plasma 5 has an explicit 'airplane' icon next to the switch which you tick to disable wireless, in KDE4 it's just the enable wireless checkbox, but does the same thing (except you uncheck it to disable): With 'enable wireless' ticked: [root@atlas ~]# rfkill list 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no With it unchecked: [root@atlas ~]# rfkill list 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no On my old Sony laptop there was a slider switch which would toggle that 'Hard blocked' status. An interesting effect (that I discovered when the switch became unreliable and I had to use a USB dongle) was the Hard blocked setting would stop both attached cards running. I suspect that's handled in networkmanager, as removing the kernel module for the builtin wifi allowed the USB one to connect okay. On my new laptop there is a function key which only acts on the 'Soft blocked' state, in windows it can be configured to act on bluetooth and wifi or bring up a controller for the different radios on board. > I'm in the distant room where WiFi sometimes fails - but infrequently - > and reception is fine at the moment; > but if WiFi does fail I'll first try turning the "wireless switch" off > for a few seconds, and then on again. > I should have thought of that earlier. > If restarting the card allows it to reconnect when it gets into the connection lost state that does somewhat suggest there are accumulated errors somewhere (in the driver maybe) due to the poor connection that eventually cause a failure. Increasing the signal by moving the wifi access point as suggested may help mask that. One other thing you can do is do a modprobe -r on the kernel module for your device and then a modprobe to load it again. If it's a problem in the driver triggered by connection errors then that may clear it. -- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org