[GTALUG] cheap as dirt old notebooks

[Giles Orr]

Debian has always had (negative) strong views about non-free drivers,
and I assume Devuan is no better.  And Wifi drivers are often
"non-free."  I use Debian heavily, so I can make suggestions about
that - although I can't address either Devuan or your specific
hardware.

For Debian, what I often have to do is to spend some time A)
determining the type of wireless device, and B) installing the drivers
for it.  `lsusb` is your friend (also try `lspci`).  This lists out
your USB devices (or PCI devices).  You should be able to spot the
Wifi.  Here are a couple examples from two of my machines:

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 0bda:8153 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8153
Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

This is a USB device that was detected and worked out-of-the-box by
Debian, much to my surprise.

02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8265 / 8275 (rev 78)

This is a PCI device, and required some work.  I hope you have a
USB-to-Ethernet dongle that works so that you can easily search and
install packages on the machine that has the problematic Wifi.

Use a browser to search for "Debian" and "Intel 8265" (or "8275").
The answer in this case turned out to be to install the
"firmware-iwlwifi" package which probably came from the "non-free"
package repository.  Even if it didn't, when dealing with Wifi you
definitely want to have the "non-free" packages available.

In this example case, simply installing the package was enough to get
the Wifi working after a reboot.  In less fortunate cases, you may
have to muck around with `insmod` and the start-up scripts.  Read the
pages you find about the particular hardware and driver and
Debian/Devuan carefully.  It's a PITA, but unless you have an
exceptionally obscure Wifi device, it's usually fairly
straight-forward.  Good luck.

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 at 10:34, o1bigtenor via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Oct 5, 2024 at 12:28 AM Kevin Cozens via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 2024-10-04 18:05, o1bigtenor via talk wrote:
> >
> > > Anyone have any ideas on how to get  wlan0 running?
> >
> > What Linux(?) distro did you install on the laptop?
>
> Installed devuan daedalus (like debian stable except no systemd).
> >
> >snip
> >
> > All the hardware features I tried are working. I heard an odd noise from the
> > laptop. The fan sounds like it needs to be changed. I was hoping for longer
> > battery life compared to my Windows based laptop (that runs at 100% CPU most
> > of the time). The laptop arrived with 92% battery life and I ran it for
> > about 9 hours today.
> >
>
> Dunno what to do but connman refuses to connect.
>
> RF-kill was alive and well - - - I just sent it away (permanently!).
> When I use #ip link set wlan0 up  there is no result (normal) but
> when I go #ip link show wlan0   I'm still getting
> wlan0: <NO-CARRIER, BROADCAST, MULTICAST, DYNAMIC,UP> mtu,1500 qdisc
> noqueue state DOWN mode DORMANT group default glen 1000
>
> so - - - how do I kick this thing in the pants to get wlan0 working?
>
> TIA
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-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com