Re: Wifi

["Steve Litt of Troubleshooters.Com" <littdom@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 08 Mar 2014 15:18:17 -0500
Patrick Alouidor <alouidor@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all. I'm not sure if it me but I have a fresh install of Debian
> 7 on laptop Toshiba C-55A5310. and For some reason I cannot enable my
> wifi switch. I have been pressing the F keys but no luck. please This
> is my first Laptop ever and I wanted to put something stable on it
> and now I cannot get my wifi to turn on. My I please get some form of
> assistance on wifi.
> 
> 
> Thank you
> 
> 
> Patrick Alouidor

Hi Patrick,

If I were in your shoes, the first thing I'd do is an orderly shutdown,
power down for 30 seconds, and power back up. You might get lucky and
have Wifi just work when it comes back up. I've seen stranger things
happen.

Then I'd get the latest
version of System Rescue CD iso, burn it, boot it on the laptop (you
might need to temporarily disable secure boot or do the compatibility
bios thing), and see if System Rescue CD sees your Wifi card. Do the
same thing for an Xubuntu live DVD.

This will tell you whether you're going to have serious problems with
Linux in general (if neither of those can give you an operational
Wifi, you have wifi hardware that's probably going to be somewhat
problematic with Linux itself). If you get one of these two live CDs to
work with Wifi, you can run commands to see what driver to use, and what
kind of wifi it is, and what transmitter you're connected to, and at
what speed and what frequency. Others on this list can give you the
exact commands. Armed with this information, it should be much easier
to get it to work in Debian.

Finally, understand there are different levels of Wifi "working", and
you need to get the more basic levels working before you can deal with
higher levels. That most basic level is being able to see a list of
all the various available Wifi transmitters (access points, whatever
they're called). You can do that, as root, with the following command:

iwconfig scanning | less

If you see no transmitters, either there's no wifi to receive, or your
hardware plus driver is failing to act as a receiver.

I feel your pain. You buy a laptop and hope its wifi works with Linux.
I've spent lots and lots of time getting Linux laptops to work.
Usually you can get a Linux compatable USB wifi dongle to work with
Linux, but those things have tiny antennas and tend to go bad quickly.
Sometimes you can get a travel router with the proper modes, have
*that* receive wifi independent of operating system, and then just plug
the travel router into your Ethernet port.

A long time ago I wrote some detailed content about getting wifi to
work with Linux. It's out of date and I'm sure it has some
inaccuracies, but it might help you to read it:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/wifitricks/travelrouter.htm

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201205/201205.htm#_Get_Wifi_to_Work

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200612/200612.htm

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance