Firmware installed, but still no wireless

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ponygon101

Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post 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.
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ponygon101

Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post 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 So, my new question is: how can I get a newer version of the kernel without adding the experimental repos?
Monsta
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Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post 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.
ponygon101

Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post 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.
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Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post 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.
ponygon101

Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post by ponygon101 »

Oh. I didn't know that. So would I just have to wait until the next update pack is released?
Monsta
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Re: Firmware installed, but still no wireless

Post 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.
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