Arch Linux

extrapalantine

Member

Registered: 2016-07-15

Posts: 64

[SOLVED] "Airplane mode" always gets turned on at boot

Thanks to the helpful folks on the Arch forums, I've been able to get my wireless connection on my HP Pavilion m6 up and running with dhcpcd / wpa_supplicant.

Problem is, every time I reboot, wireless connectivity completely disappears, until I run "systemctl suspend" -- at which point I'm able to bring up the network using "systemctl start dhcpcd.service."

I've been reading that the cause of this problem is probably "airplane mode" getting stuck on at the hardware/BIOS level. This would seem to be at least part of my problem, because on every reboot, the "airplane mode" light turns red before I even boot an OS (at the GRUB menu), and tapping the key has no effect on it (with or without the Fn key). But soon as I boot into Arch, run "systemctl suspend," and wake the system back up, the "airplane mode" light turns white, and I'm able to bring up my dhcpcd connection.

I've tried just about everything to turn off airplane mode at boot -- including adding this script as a systemctl service that runs at startup:

[Unit]
Description=RFKill-Unblock Devices

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rfkill unblock all
ExecStop=
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Journalctl seems to confirm that the script runs as intended -- in fact, running "rfkill list" immediately upon login returns the following:

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
1: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no

But on the laptop's keyboard, the "airplane mode" light remains red. As soon as I run "systemctl suspend," however, it turns white, and the connection works.

Does anyone have any experience with disabling airplane mode at the hardware level, or preventing it from ever being turned on in the first place?

Last edited by extrapalantine (2018-06-10 15:37:33)

extrapalantine

Member

Registered: 2016-07-15

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] "Airplane mode" always gets turned on at boot

Update: I was finally able to find a solution that doesn't seem to be on the Arch forums, so I'm leaving it here in case anyone else is as frustrated as I am with an HP Pavilion laptop.

The solution is:  Go into the BIOS menu, and press F9 to restore setup defaults.

That's it. After three days of fruitless searching, that's the solution that finally worked.

The system boots normally now -- and with "systemctl enable dhcpcd.service," the wireless connection turns on at boot.

Last edited by extrapalantine (2018-06-10 15:38:06)