Hi to Everyone,
Concerning the older laptop – a DELL Inspiron 1525 – 32bits, about 20
yrs old which previously ran Hardy Heron (ubuntu 8.04) in dual boot with
Windows XP, where I first installed a 32bits version of Bookworm a
little more than a month ago (I think it was april 8th), there was, at
first, no issue with airplane mode, and WiFi internet connexion did
occur right away – the installation process made use of it.
This is not until a few days ago that the connection went off and that
every attempt to restaure it failed with the info that my laptop was in
‘airplane mode’, which mode I failed to turn off. I first thought that
this failure was specific to that very old machine, or that, maybe, my
Livebox had recently gone into problems generating WiFi (which is not
the case, since an Amazon apparatus still WiFi connects ; the apparatus
has a built-in airplane mode which enables and disables all-right)
I wouldn’t have dared to install bookworm on such an old machine, but I
read a forum on very old machines (debian.users also has a thread on
this), and many specialists acknowledged that Bookworm was quite fit for
these antiquities, even when installing Gnome (which I did)
The other old laptop is not quite as old… I use it almost everyday
(as often as my 3 yrs old desktop actually running Buster)
This is a Clevo machine AMD64 about 10 yrs old, which ran Ubuntu 14.04
until yesterday that I installed Debian 12. I installed it from scratch,
since there likely was no way to ‘upgrade’ with such a generation gap
and from Ubuntu to Debian.
Problem is : installation went all-right…, except that, same problem,
internet wired connexion works all-right, but WiFi don’t, since Airplane
mode that I can’t (or don’t know howto) disable.
With the very old Dell Inspiron above described, WiFi connexion worked
from, say, from april 8th 2025, to may 10th (approximately guessed dates),
with the Clevo on may 16th Bookworm installation, the ‘airplane mode’
was there right from the beginning.
This leads me to suppose that, possibly, a Debian Bookworm update has
been dispatched about may 10th, 2025 plus or minus a few days, disabling
any easy way to get out of airplane mode… likely for security reasons.
A quick google search as well as a debian-user group search, showed that
a number of debian users have encountered problems with WiFi ‘airplane
mode’, and this, much earlier than april 2025. None of the tricks that
they spoke about, did work here (Fn-F12...)
Thanks in advance for your help
Bernard
