Blacklist Onboard Wifi Card

Hardware Support
1

Hi,

I just upgraded my home's wifi to a 5 GHz network. My Lenovo B570 with Zorin OS 16 beta has a Broadcom BCM 4313 802.11b/g/n network card in it. Rather than replace that, I bought a wifi dongle that can handle 5 GHz. It's installed and working and all is good except that I would like to turn off the onboard wifi card.

I'd rather not physically yank the onboard card out because now and then I have occasion to take the laptop off my desk, and I don't want this dongle hanging off the side at that time. I'll put up with 2.4 GHz in those instances. So what I would like to do is turn the onboard Wi-Fi card off so that it isn't consuming power and broadcasting interference while I'm using the 5 GHz dongle.

The hardware switch on the B570 just shuts off all wireless activity. Toggling off the PCI Wi-Fi in the Zorin OS network manager also turns off the USB Wi-Fi. Using rfkill kills both the PCI and the USB wireless no matter which options I block.

I have tried to blacklist the bcma module by adding it to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

I have removed it from the "Additional Drivers" tab in the Software & Updates application.

Still, despite rebooting after each of these steps, the PCI Wi-Fi is still searching for a network while the USB Wi-Fi just gets it done.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might disable the PCI Wi-Fi until it is needed?

Thanks,
Danny

2

After doing this, did you run

update-initramfs -u

Blacklisting the module really should work. If it is not working, I would retrace the steps.

3

I did not update after modifying the blacklist.conf. I feel pretty stupid now. :roll_eyes: Thanks for that. It works now.

4

That one and update-grub both get me all the time. I usually forget. :smiley: