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Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 12:48 am
by ponygon101
I've installed LMDE Cinnamon and managed to get EFI installed. I've had my phone tethering and connect to ethernet. When it's connected to my phone, under the Wi-Fi menu, I see "Wired," "Android" (with an on/off switch) and "Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet Controller." The result of inxi -N is
Code: Select all
Network: Card-1 Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller driver r8169
Card-2 Ralink corp. Device 539b
I've looked online and for both cards, it need "firmware-realtek" and "firmware-ralink" to be installed. The issue is that both are already installed by default. How can I get Wi-Fi to work? It works out of the box on regular Mint.
Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 3:11 am
by ponygon101
I've found out why it doesn't work. My wireless drivers don't work out of the box until kernel 3.4. This post:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 3d#p582190 speculates that that kenel might not ever make it to testing and the latest in experiment is 3.8. So, my new question is: how can I get a newer version of the kernel without adding the experimental repos?
Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 6:17 am
by Monsta
I might have misunderstood something, but
this bug report shows that support for Ralink's RT539B has been added to the kernel. This kernel version is just not in LMDE yet.
Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 12:22 pm
by ponygon101
Monsta wrote:I might have misunderstood something, but
this bug report shows that support for Ralink's RT539B has been added to the kernel. This kernel version is just not in LMDE yet.
I know, that's what I said in my second post. But testing won't have it since it's feature. Only the experimental repos have a newer kernel but I don't want to have to use that repo.
Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 12:41 pm
by Monsta
No, not so new kernel. According to that bug report, it has been fixed in 3.2.35-1. And there's 3.2.39-2 in Testing already.
Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 12:47 pm
by ponygon101
Oh. I didn't know that. So would I just have to wait until the next update pack is released?
Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless
Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 3:09 am
by Monsta
It's hard to say when it'll be released. It may be released before Wheezy release - in this case you'll get this kernel as it'll still be in Testing. It may be released after Wheezy release - in this case you'll get a lot of packages from the new Testing (codenamed Jessie) and the brand new kernel (3.6, or 3.8, or even newer) which may migrate from Experimental.