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Fix Wi-Fi Hotspot Not Working (Can not connect) in Ubuntu 18.04

Last updated: October 22, 2019

Paper GTK3 and Icon themes

Turning on Wi-Fi Hotspot in Wi-Fi settings is not working very well in Ubuntu 18.04 default Gnome desktop. It says ‘can not connect’ or ‘password error’ when I’m tring to connect via iOS or Android device.

Since Ubuntu switched to Gnome 3, Wi-Fi Hotspot can be easily created by the System Settings utility. It’s however not working very well in my Ubuntu 18.04 laptop. And here’s a workaround to make it work

1.) Press Alt+F2 on keyboard to bring up ‘Enter a Command’ box, then input nm-connection-editor and hit Enter.

2.) When the ‘Network Connections‘ window pops up, click on the bottom-left plus button to create a new connection.

3.) In next window, seleft Wi-Fi from the drop-down box.

4.) After clicked the ‘Create…’ button, do following settings in next window.

  • Type connection name: whatever as you want (Ji-laptop in the case)
  • Type SSID: whatever as you want (ubuntu1804 in the case)
  • Select Mode: Hotspot
  • (Optional) Set password in Wi-Fi security tab. (WPA & WPA2 Personal in my case)

Tip: you may disable ‘Automatically connect to this network when it is available’ in General tab, or Wi-Fi hotspot auto-enabled in every login.

5.) Finally in Wi-Fi Settings window, do:

  • click the top-right menu and select Connect to Hidden Network…
  • then choose connect to the previous created network.

That’s it. Enjoy!

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    8 responses to Fix Wi-Fi Hotspot Not Working (Can not connect) in Ubuntu 18.04

    1. Shyam Gautam November 22, 2019 at 9:44 pm

      This not working .

    2. Anand Prakash November 26, 2019 at 7:07 pm

      Thanks, it is working!!

    3. sealinger December 30, 2019 at 1:07 pm

      This is Not working.

    4. Sachintha January 1, 2020 at 2:51 am

      Thanks, it’s worked to me too.

    5. Ajay Kumar April 11, 2020 at 9:32 pm

      Not working for me 3😔😔

    6. Johan April 22, 2020 at 12:51 pm

      Nope! Not working!

      The steps outlined are exactly also how one would do it with other Linux distributions, and I did manage to make it work on the same laptop with exactly the same steps. So the steps themselves are fine. I think because only few people with to make a hotspot, this functionality received poor testing and support.

      I will scale down to Ubuntu 16.04.

    7. Bastiaan April 25, 2020 at 10:44 am

      Thank you! It finally worked for me. I only had to restart before it worked.
      Ubuntu 19.10

    8. Sk_Rock June 23, 2020 at 3:24 pm

      Thank You! man really helpfull…