[SOLVED] Mint KDE 18.3: no Wi-Fi on Dell Inspiron 17-5748

[letian]

Returning to Mint...
And head bumping into sweet old "this kernel does not support your card" issue that still plagues the land of Ubuntu/Debian derivatives.
Anyway, I have just downloaded KDE .iso image, created a live USB and installed over one of the previous Linux installations on a dual boot system with Windows 7.

After booting into KDE desktop I click on the network icon and see no active Wi-Fi networks even though there should be one available.
Checking the kernel, looks like it is still 4.10.
Checking the network cards:

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Card-1: Broadcom BCM43142 
Card-2: Realtek RTL8101/2/6E PCI Express Fast/Gigabit Ethernet controller driver: r8169

Is there a quick way to fix the Wi-Fi on this laptop?

[wallyUSA]

Returning to Mint...
...Checking the network cards:

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Card-1: Broadcom BCM43142 
Card-2: Realtek RTL8101/2/6E PCI Express Fast/Gigabit Ethernet controller driver: r8169

Is there a quick way to fix the Wi-Fi on this laptop?

I am not a tech guy but I can tell you several years ago I installed Ubuntu on a Dell and had problems with wifi. Seems like I had to install a proprietary driver for the BCM43XX. Maybe this will help while you are waiting for someone to give you a specific solution.

[JeremyB]

Post results for

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lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net

[letian]

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net output what I've already posted above.

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Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n (rev 01)
Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1704 802.11n + BT 4.0
Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: bcma

Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101/2/6E PCI Express Fast/Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 07)
Subsystem: Dell RTL8101/2/6E PCI Express Fast/Gigabit Ethernet controller
Kernel driver in use: r8169
Kernel modules: r8169

[letian]

I am not a tech guy but I can tell you several years ago I installed Ubuntu on a Dell and had problems with wifi

And it still does
Seriously, I have installed Arch and then Manjaro on the very same laptop and never had issues with Wi-Fi. It is 2018 and Wi-Fi is still not supported on a 4-year old laptop out-of-the-box, this is just sad.
I shall try installing a newer kernel.

UPDATE:
Newer kernel didn't solve the problem, so I tried installing realtek drivers from github, that didn't help either. Now I am starting to think this is specifically Mint KDE issue.

[letian]

I solved the issue. You'll need to install bcmwl-kernel-source package from https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/admi ... nel-source to make Wi-Fi work and a newer linux-image-4.14. Anyway, in case you don't have internet access but have a spare laptop you'll end up donwloading some additional packages like libc6 and its dependencies to make this one work

More information on how to deal with Broadcom cards is here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/i ... ss-drivers