I’m currently enjoying refurbishing an old Dell notebook to make it suitable for the garage, where I can quickly look something up without having to take off my work gloves or worry about getting the laptop dirty. That’s why I’ve installed Lubuntu on this 16-year-old machine, and I was a bit desperate when the WLAN wasn’t working. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get it running because there might not be a Linux driver, but it was simply a matter of the switch being set to “off.”
Dedicated WLAN Switch
The fact that WLAN can be turned on and off via a switch or, nowadays, more commonly via a double-assigned key on the keyboard using the Fn key is still true today. However the Dell Vostro 1500 has the switch located on the left side:
Mine was, of course, set to “off.” Unless you’re sitting in an airplane and need to turn off WLAN during takeoff and landing, nobody needs this switch. I believe it causes more problems than it helps, similar to the Caps Lock key for permanent capitalization.
In the past, it may have been turned off here and there for energy-saving reasons to extend battery life. In the age of Chromebooks, which are exclusively designed to be always online, and where most users probably don’t know what to do with a notebook without an active internet connection, everyone probably prefers to throttle the CPU via the power-saving settings rather than cut off the internet connection.
By the way, Lubuntu runs surprisingly smoothly on this really old device. In order to keep a few more tabs open in Firefox, some used RAM has also come home via classified ads and is waiting to be installed.
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