How to turn off PCI Wifi without turns off USB Wifi in Gnome 3

Question

I use Fedora with Gnome 3 desktop on acer laptop. I usually use usb wifi for connectivity than the pci wifi inside my laptop. Before yesterday, I use usb wifi and turn off pci wifi by set the pci wifi as hotspot so it's not connecting to any wifi hotspot. If I not change pci wifi to hotspot, my primary connection always use pci wifi and can't use connection from usb wifi. But yesterday, when I set pci wifi to hotspot, the hotspot wont start, and I can't use my usb wifi. If I try to turn off pci wifi, it's also turns off usb wifi and activate airplane mode. How to turn off pci wifi without turns off usb wifi? Thank you for your answer.

Answer 1

Building off of @JulesW's answer (since I can't comment), in case you don't want to (or can't) use ifconfig, the equivalent operation in ip is

ip link set wlan0 down

Your adapter might have a different name than wlan0 though. You can get the status and names of all your adapters by just using

ip link

And of course, you may need to run the operation as root.

Answer 2

I propose you a workaround using ifconfig

sudo ifconfig wlan0 down

I call this command just after turning on the WiFi from the gnome applet (before it connects to any network), otherwise gnome get confused. This way it sees only one WiFi connected (the USB one). PCI Wifi is still 'on' in the applet but 'not connected'.

you can look at this https://askubuntu.com/questions/168032/how-to-disable-built-in-wifi-and-use-only-usb-wifi-card for more soltions, I didn't try.