Does the laptop have a hardware wifi switch? Or a Fn-key wifi switch?
Yes, this Dell machine does have a hardware wi-fi switch. I searched for this subject and found
this post (albeit featuring Ubuntu) about a possibly similar issue. The poster first just checked that the wi-fi switch was enabled:
"The hardware switch does not seem to change the state of the machine when I switch it on and off. As a result, the wifi networking does not work.
I have already verified that wifi is enabled in the BIOS."
but then further down posts again that he had misread the instruction:
"Well... I'm embarrassed to say that this was 'user error' once again. When I checked the BIOS I was looking to verify that wifi was enabled. I also saw that wifi was configured to be controlled by the hardware switch. Not thinking deeply enough about this I then thought it was configured correctly...
Turns out that since Ubuntu drivers are not able to read the switch state, then by changing the BIOS configuration so wifi is NOT enabled by the hardware switch, the hardware block was removed. Now everything is working as expected."
Following this, I have checked in the BIOS, and there are two sets of settings, 'Wireless Switch' and 'Wireless Device Enable'.
Wireless Switch
wwan [x] wlan [x]
wiGig [x] Bluetooth [x]
This setting determines which wireless devices can be controlled by the Wireless Switch.
For Windows 8 systems, this is controlled by OS driver directly, so the setting here doesn't affect
the Wireless Switch behavior.
Wireless Device Enable
wwan [x] wlan/wiGig [x]
Bluetooth [x]
These fields allow enabling/disabling of internal wireless devices.
The above shows the settings I found.
I then unchecked 'wlan' in the Wireless Switch settings (following what I think the poster did in the end), but this has not made a difference to the behaviour.
It feels as if we are getting close. I suspect the final answer may be a combination of one of these BIOS switch settings and some setting in Network Manager, or am I being too optimistic?
Does "nmcli radio" show the wifi on?
Command
nmcli radio gives:
WIFI-HW WIFI WWAN-HW WWAN
enabled enabled enabled enabled
I repeated the Ubuntu poster's command
rfkill list all, and got:
1: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
2: dell-bluetooth: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
3: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
4: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no