I apologize if this seems like a trivial matter, but I have a laptop (a Lenovo Ideapad 3 to be exact) and I can’t get WiFi (or Bluetooth) to work on anything other than Ubuntu 23.04 and its flavors. I tried OpenSUSE Leap and Debian 12, both couldn’t detect the built-in WiFi card. I also tried Ubuntu-based distros such as Linux Mint, KDE Neon, and Zorin OS, same problem. I tried Kubuntu 22.04 LTS and even that couldn’t detect the WiFi card! So for the mean time, I’m stuck with using Ubuntu 23.04. Any ideas to get around this? Can I use Ubuntu to figure the exact WiFi card that’s being used then download its driver? If so, how can I do that exactly? Note that my Laptop doesn’t have a built-in Ethernet port, and I don’t want to buy a USB Ethernet adapter only for it not work out of the box either! Any help would be appreciated!

  • snoodwattle@lemm.ee
    3·
    1 year ago

    You could also check the symlinks for the device in the sysfs. The word after “drivers” below for a given network interface (eth0 below) is usually the name of the driver (cpsw below):

    $ ls -l /sys/class/net/eth0/device/driver   
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug  9 10:41 /sys/class/net/eth0/device/driver -> ../../../../bus/platform/drivers/cpsw

    Or run lsmod and see if anything jumps out.

    Either way, once you find the driver name, run modinfo to get version and other information about specific drivers.

    Edit: formatting