Balasankar C

Balasankar C

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Lenovo G5030 WiFi Disabled in Linux Mint

Heyo folks,
Recently, I bought a Lenovo G5030 Laptop for my father. The first thing I did, was install GNU/Linux in it. Since it was for my father, I installed Linux Mint 17.1 in it. It detected Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth automatically. But the issue was, WiFi was disabled. I tried clicking the toggle button in Network Panel (from the network applet in bottom panel). But, it never got enabled. So, I decided to fire rfkill list, to check whether the WiFi was blocked. Guess what, it was blocked.

rfkill list

The module ideapad_wlan was hard blocked. Since, it was hardblocked, rfkill unblock all won't touch it. After a bit of searching internet forums, I found the answer. I had to blacklist ideapad_wlan. So, I did the following command
echo "blacklist ideapad_laptop" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
Just to make sure that the line was added to blacklist.conf, I did a tail on the file

tail

I had to reload the module using sudo modprobe -r ideapad_laptop. Then, when I tried rfkill list, ideapad_wlan was no longer there (actually, ideapad_bluetooth was also gone, which I hope is for good). However, the physical wlan was also soft blocked. I unblocked it using sudo rfkill unblock all and voila! everything worked fine.

wififine

PS : Will try out the laptop more and write a detailed review when I get time. Also, need to check it for h-node.org