Wi-Fi Problems when Installing Linux on ASUS machines

Recently, I’ve been exploring installing various Linux distributions over my Windows installation. The main reason for doing this would be not having to pull up a virtual machine every time I wanted to do anything.

But with both Arch Linux and Ubuntu, I kept running into the same problem: I couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi. I poked around, and it said that my network switch (the hardware one) was switched off. No matter what I tried to do with rfkill, I couldn’t get the physical switch back on.

My ASUS computer doesn’t have a network switch. There’s an ‘airplane mode’ button, but that didn’t really do anything either. I eventually found the solution in this thread, but I’ll repeat it here.

echo "options asus_nb_wmi wapf=4" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/asus_nb_wmi.conf

..or simply put that line in that file. asus_nb_wmi is the driver for the Wi-Fi module. What does wapf=4 do? Well, according to this,

When WAPF = 4 — driver sends ACPI scancode 0x88 which is converted by asus-wmi to RFKILL key, which is processed by all registerd rfkill drivers to toggle their state.

Essentially, it is making rfkill recognize that the hardware switch is not off, so the Wi-Fi works again.

Thanks for reading!