Bug 2218376

After a recent update on an old Dell Studio 1749 laptop, I discovered that Airplane mode was turned. Attempting to turn it off in either the upper right dialog box or the Network Settings dialog only resulted in the button being dimmed while the mouse was down but nothing else changed and there was no message to indicate why.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Simply reboot the laptop and Airplane mode was still on.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Airplane mode still on and unable to turn it off.

Expected Results:  
Airplane mode turns on/off on request.

The Dell Studio 1749 does not have an external wireless on/off switch. It only has the Fn+F2 option for turning off/on wireless outside the desktop controls.

I was able to resolve this eventually with a BIOS setting change: I've made no no BIOS changes to this laptop in many years. (It's only used as a portable test & client visit tool.) If found under the Advanced BIOS section a Wireless Switch/(Hotkey) setting which showed "All". After I changed the setting to "None" and rebooted, I was able to turn Airplane mode on/off and connect to my various wireless networks normally. The Fn+F2 combination no longer has any effect, of course. The "ALL" choice is supposed to let the software turn all wireless services on/off.

lshw showed "network - DISABLED" for the wireless card, but nothing I tried could re-enable it (e.g. rfkill). In desperation I resorted to a fresh install of Fedora 38 and subsequent package update and only then discovered that Airplane mode was still locked on after the re-install/update which led me to investigate the BIOS for a solution. (I have not attempted a fresh install without the subsequent update.)

I can't tell which component may have changed to cause this new behavior, but it took a lot of time to investigate initially because the UI didn't report "Hardware disabled" or somesuch instead of just no action after a click on a button.

I recognize that gnome-nettool may not be the right ultimate place for this problem, but I don't know what lower-level component interacts with the BIOS Wireless setting and may have changed to cause this problem which was reflected in poor behavior at the UI.