Fedora 22 wifi unavailable Lenovo G50 laptop

Hi to all,

I'm a complete newbie to Linux but I'm happy to have changed.
My internet is working with cable but no wifi signal is received.
I have a brandnew Lenovo G50 laptop. Under Windows 8.1 the signal
was received, so I guess it's a matter of configuration under Fedora 22.
Could you help me with this? It says "wifi unavailable".

Thanks a lot in advance

Hi,

I don't use Fedora, but let's get some more info, as I see it's been a few hours since you posted and have gotten no response.

Open up a terminal window (Fedora uses GNOME, hit the Super - Windows - Key, and start typing terminal).

Type at the $ prompt, and hit enter:

lspci -v | grep -i wireless

You should get output like this (example from my laptop):

~ $ lspci -v | grep -i wireless
02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

Now, post the result here. While you're waiting, if you're a bit impatient (who isn't? ) do a search for Fedora 22 and the wireless chipset listed in the output.

Check in the package manager, find if there are firmware packages, and see if the description includes your chipset. If you find one, install it (the above may be quicker, this one will help you get used to using the package manager).

Hi goumba,

Thank you very much for your reply! My terminal tells me the following:

02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

Maybe this is already helpful? I will try now as well to do the search as advised by you.

Update: I installed now the GNOME package manager and did a search on the network adapter, but I wasn't too lucky. The only entry is entitled "Easily test network connectivity". I entered "RTL8723BE" and "Realtek Semiconductor" as key words.

Best

I suspect Lenovo is using a custom wifi driver. I have a Lenovo y70-70, and when I tried fedora 22 on it first it wouldn't boot at all, I had to disable the fancy 4gb nvidia gpu features in the bios first. Once F22 was booted (live usb), I also had no wifi.

My solution, I had recently gotten a raspberry kit that included a cheap usb wifi dongle, plugge that in the Lenovo and it worked fine. Much easier than trying to find the appropriate Lenovo linux driver, I think.

wbernd,

Check out this question @askfedora. You'll need an ethernet or some other way of getting the files to your laptop, obviously, but it should do the job.

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/que...23be-wireless/

Yes, it's for f20, but still applies.

Hi Doug and goumba,

thank you, guys, for your replies! I do consider actually to change the distro in order to make life easier.
I had selected Fedora 22 because it was a free DVD in a Linux magazine. But I had expected it to be a little bit more out of the box/plug and play. Do you think with Ubuntu (or alternative?) there would be the same issue?

Thank you for letting me know.

Wolfram

Originally Posted by wbernd Hi Doug and goumba, thank you, guys, for your replies! I do consider actually to change the distro in order to make life easier. I had selected Fedora 22 because it was a free DVD in a Linux magazine. But I had expected it to be a little bit more out of the box/plug and play. Do you think with Ubuntu (or alternative?) there would be the same issue?

You'll get a different user experience with Ubuntu, as they use their own user interface called "Unity".

If you'd like to keep the same as with fedora (GNOME 3), give Debian (debian.org) a try. I checked and the Debian firmware package does include the firmware for your card - you would need to enable a repository to get it but that's trivial once the system is running:

anthony@serenity: ~ $ apt-cache show firmware-realtek
Package: firmware-realtek
Source: firmware-nonfree
Version: 0.44
Installed-Size: 790
Maintainer: Debian Kernel Team <debian-kernel@lists.debian.org>
Architecture: all
Suggests: initramfs-tools
Description-en: Binary firmware for Realtek wired and wireless network adapters
 This package contains the binary firmware for some Ethernet adapters with
 the RTL8111/RTL8168 chips supported by the r8169 driver; and wireless
 network cards with the RTL8188, RTL8192, RTL8712, RTL8723 and RTL8821
 chips supported by the r8192_pci, r8192s_usb, r8712u, rtl8188eu,
 rtl8192ce, rtl8192cu, rtl8192de, rtl8192ee, rtl8192se, rtl8723ae,
 r8723au/rtl8723au, rtl8723be and rtl8821ae drivers.
 .
 Contents:
... snip...
  * Realtek RTL8723BE firmware (rtlwifi/rtl8723befw.bin)
...

Give this a try before reinstalling a whole system.

You must be root (superuser, run a "root terminal": press windows key, type root, and click the root terminal icon).

What this is doing is copying the required firmware file to where the kernel can find it. If your kernel supports the card and just needs the firmware, this will do it. I can't guarantee that Fedora includes the necessary module, but it's worth a shot.

cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-realtek_0.44_all.deb
ar x firmware-realtek_0.44_all.deb
tar xf data.tar.xz
cp -Rp lib/firmware/rtlwifi /lib/firmware

Reboot, and see if Network Manager (the WiFi/network icon in the top panel) detects your networks.

Hi all,

I changed to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu.
So hopefully life will get easier!

Cheers from Dublin