just got a Lenovo G50-45 AMD A6 and installed Slack64-14.1 by disabling SecureBoot and enabling Legacy Mode in the BIOS. And with 16gb ram and a 250gb Samsung SSD, the machine is rather...snappy...

however much googling has revealed that the Realtek wifi card is a POS, and worse, Lenovo has a BIOS whitelist that prevents user replacement of this useless chunk of excreta.

Anyone with any experience with a workaround?

probably this helps: http://askubuntu.com/questions/13963...not-recognized

Different Lenovo, different network adapter, original WiFi device RTL8188CE (rtl8192ce) kept stalling or would go to a very slow speed. I replaced it with a different WiFi adapter. BIOS would not continue with the new WiFi adapter.

After much searching I found a modified BIOS for the exact laptop model/bios (so the whitelist check always returned true) and although I was very hesitant, the install went well and the new adapter works great.

thanks, I had read through that prior to posting...it seems that despite getting it to "work", it works poorly...I was experimenting with this machine and had installed ubuntustudio14.04 before I put slack back on, and while the correct driver/firmware combo existed in that distro, the card performed extremely poorly...many random dropout/disconnects

I think there's a new rtl8xxxu driver in the upcoming Linux 4.4 Kernel that might work for that chip.
I would try an RC of the 4.4 kernel and test if it works if i had that chip.

Long years ago, after much angst with wifi, I swore never to buy anything that had a BMC or Realtek (wifi) chip in it.
Not long after Intel started really supporting Linux. I never use anything else.

FWIW 4.4.0 seems fine although (obviously) I can't comment on the support for that chip.

thanks Nille, I browsed through the changes and saw the references to rtl8723 and will have a go at compiling 4.4rc1...

for the benefit of those who may be saddled with this card

before taking Nille's advice to try the 4.4 kernel, I got the rtlwifinew drivers from lwfinger on github, compiled and installed, removed wicd and then reinstalled it and now it functions...we'll see if I have the same issues reported elsewhere

getting this to work felt like it was 1999 all over again!

unfortunately, this card performs really poorly... many, repeated dropouts/disconnects even though wicd still shows the green bar for a connection...it's almost as annoying as the ads on youtube videos

I think I'm just going to replace it with an Intel 7260/7265...both appear to be made for Lenovo

linux-4.4 is the most bad start cycle starts i see NEVER , for new branch.

4.4-rc1 build error
4.4-rc2 build error
4.4-rc3 compile ok , but bug on boot
4.4-rc4 build , and boot , but BIG number of errors in dmesg around ata , and write I/O errors a lot

because card is pci cant go to virtual enviroment , then be carefull.


You can try install ,some 4.4 backports , (only 4.4 have the new rtl drivers)
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/ker...able/v4.4-rc2/

Kinda old thread but... What NIC are you using now with the Lenovo G50-45? I have the G50-45 as well and have been using the rtl8723be for a while with LinuxMint and kernels from 3.16 up to now with 4.7 and it's fairly stable. Both with and without the lwfinger driver. Disabling power management in /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf makes a big difference. There is a bug in NetworkManager that I have to workaround by running this command to reset it from time to time... 'systemctl restart NetworkManager.service'

I got so frustrated with this Lenovo that I tried unsuccessfully to sell it...so it has sat unused since that time...got it out the other day and I used the plasma5 liveslack disk to test it out and it the touchpad driver and the rtl8723be driver seem to be improved, so I installed 14.2 on it and it seems to be working fine so far...

If you have sporadic disconnects try turning off power management with the following two settings I have uncommented in this file, or create the file with this content if it does not exist. For me the most annoying is that Suspend/Resume/Hibernate does not work on my G50-45 with the latest Lenovo BIOS version and running the latest kernel versions. I don't have the courage to try flash downgrading my BIOS, so will live with it. I recently migrated from HD to an SSD so my startup and shutdown is now sufficiently fast, lowering the need for Suspend.