No wi-fi on Dell Vostro A860 with MX 19.1
 

Hi,

Recently installed MX on this old laptop and everything seems okay. When I connect the Ethernet port to the router with a cable, instantly I get a popup telling me I'm connected, and the Internet works fine. Wi-fi is another story. Nothing I've tried lets me tune in on my router (or any of the 30+ others in the area). I heard something about incompatibility between Linux drivers and Dell hardware; could that be the problem? I'm no genius so let's take it slow and easy. Thanks.

What is the wireless chipset?

The command lspci issued in a terminal should provide that information. You may have to issue the command as root.

As an aside, the Dells I've had (I've had several Inspirons over the years) all had Broadcom chipsets, when can be gotten to work in Linux. It just usually takes a couple of extra steps.

First you need to tell us what your wireless card is... post the output of and we can go from there.

Qualcomm Atheros AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

that adapter would seem to have a linux driver. can you run inxi -n and iwconfig (as root [not sure if mx uses sudo or su] - looks like it is probably sudo) to get some more info about the state of your adapter.

Also. What does

Have to say about this?

From inxi it shows that the driver for the wireless adapter is ath5k. It also says IF: wlan0 and state: down.

For iwconfig it shows a lot of stuff for wlan0; I'm not sure what's relevant.

It comes back with "soft blocked: no"
"hard blocked: yes"

from an rfkill manpage:
is it possible there is a switch in the off position?

The only switch I can think of that is relevant is the wi-fi switch on the router, but it is definitely on. My tablet connects to it wirelessly no problem.

Can't find any hardware switches on the laptop. Would it help to log into the router and tweak something? (I know about as much about networks as I do about Linux.) Or must we assume at this point that there's a hardware problem inside the laptop? (Oh, horrors!)

Yes, according to rfkill there is a wifi switch on the laptop and it is set to "off". Therefore it cannot initiate wireless. Do you have one of the FN-key combos on that to kill wifi, if so, try that.

this page suggests there is possibly a function key and this image makes it look like it is f11.

check whether there is a key combination to enable the wifi, some laptop it uses the "fn" key + "f3" or it could be other keys

Yes, that's how my keyboard looks also. Looks like I missed the obvious--except that that doesn't work either. In fact, many of the blue functions on certain keys don't do anything or don't do what they say. Only the blue brightness and volume control keys work, and a few of the other blue ones work in Libre Office, like the slash and asterisk. Is there possibly a Linux driver needed to make those keys work?

Tried every key combination I could think of but no go.