Re: Buster on laptop cannot find Nokia 3 hotspot...

On Aug 7, 2019 11:38, Nektarios Katakis <nektarios@mail.nektarioskatakis.xyz> wrote:

On Wed, 07 Aug 2019 10:42:09 +0200
Nimrod <nimrod@virgilio.it> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> my (very old) laptop has been working like a charm until I updated
> from Stretch to Buster. Among the other, the issue in the subject is
> very relevant for me.
>
> Here is what happens when I turn on wi-fi hotspot on Nokia 3
> smartphone (Android up to date):
>
> 1) any smartphone or tablet in the family can connect to my Nokia 3
> hotspot.
>
> 2) my laptop can connect at least to a tablet hotspot (the tablet has
> a rather old Android version, I guess 6 or even less, and it cannot be
> updated); also, my laptop finds a lot of wi-fi networks around
> (currently I'm in a building in the small town of Anzio, Italy, but
> almost every corner of the town is full of wi-fi networks)
>
> 3) my laptop cannot even see any hotspot provided by a Nokia 3
> smartphone with Android up to date; we have three of them, and I
> checked everyone one of them: they all can be used by the tablet in
> point 2) above, and none of them are even found by my laptop.
>
> It seems there is something wrong with my laptop and Nokia 3 when they
> try to communicate. Currently I'm still using my Nokia 3 as a modem
> via Bluetooth, but the connection is rather slow. When the wi-fi
> hotspot was working the speed was much higher.
>
> Some data:
>
> - the laptop is a HP 6730s, quite slow but incredibly robust; Buster
> is up to date
> - all the Nokia 3 have Android 9 July update
>
> Thanks in advance for any hint.
>
>

A good place to check your wireless issues is the excellent wifi howto
page from debian docs https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse.

I'll certainly take a look at it.

You re not mentioning what software you re using to connect to wifi.

Just Gnome Shell interface, which I guess is just a GUI for Network Manager.

From the right upper corner of the screen I can look at all wifi networks available. There are many, my wife's tablet hotspot immediately appears if turned on, but none of our three Nokia 3 even appears there when hotspot is turned on, not even after many many minutes.

But my wife's tablet immediately connects to any of the Nokia 3 hotspot. So does her Alcatel smartphone, a very low level device. Ah, the laptop even connects without problem at all with my wife's Alcatel hotspot.

For your case I would check 2 things: 1) `dmesg` output to check if you
see any errors from your network card driver or if its loaded correctly.

I definitely exclude any problems with the network card driver, because it perfectly works with many other wifi devices, as I told above. Nevertheless I'll follow your suggestion as soon as I come back home.

2) The output of `iwlist scan` to see if the network you re looking
for is detected from the hardware.

This is interesting, I didn't know this command. It would rather strange if the hotspot is shown by the above command but not by Network Manager.

Thanks a lots.

Regards

--
Nektarios Katakis