Dell Laptop : Ubuntu 10.x Wireless Disabled : Quick Fix

I face this quite often in my ubuntu 10.x on Dell laptop, though I am not really sure why it happens. After troubleshooting so many steps, I figured out a quick fix.

First verify whether your connection is hard blocked or soft blocked.


$ rfkill list
0: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
1: dell-bluetooth: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
2: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no

Soft blocks, you can enable the wireless through right-click on top panel task bar.

If its hard blocked as its shown above , following command did trick for me 

$ sudo rmmod -f dell-laptop

Anyone knows why it happens? 

How to get rid of windows control characters in unix

Open file and on command mode execute below

%s/ctrl-v ctrl-m//g

Finally, it should show :%s/^M//g

Alternatively we can also execute dos2unix utility to convert the file from windows to unix.

dos2unix filefromdos.xml filetounix.xml


We can also transfer the zip file and unzip it using ASCII mode.


$unzip -a mywindowsfile.zip