The Wifi connection of the laptop keeps getting disconnected with my router. This doesn’t happen with any of my other devices at the home. This laptop is dual booted with Windows 11 and the Windows session doesn’t face network interruptions ever. I am sitting couple feet away from my router in clear sight.
The only way to solve is to turn off Wifi in my KDE’s system tray, and turn back on and connect. But this connection doesn’t last more than few minutes and I again get disconnected.
I have tried switching between LTS kernel and the mainline kernel and the problem persists in both of the scenarios
I’m also having an issue with that Wi-Fi chip, and I would like to follow this driver maintainer’s guide here: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89
But I’m not advanced enough to figure out how am I supposed to “BLACKLIST THE KERNEL VERSIONS” properly. @manuel any advice on this? And why exactly r8169 driver?
Also, from that same driver’s README for Arch - any advice on how to install “the necessary kernel headers and base-devel”?
Command lsmod can show currently used kernel modules.
Be sure to blacklist only the “conflicting” modules when installing another for the same purpose.
About r8169, sorry about that, it is an Ethernet driver so no need to blacklist that.
Thank you! That was a very helpful piece of info!
In the end, however, properly installing that AUR (which uses the latest driver version from git) and blacklisting existing modules ends up with failing to load that driver with some error.
What an unlucky Wi-Fi module I got in that HP laptop.
I wonder what kind of magic Ubuntu does, because that Wi-Fi works perfectly fine on it.
I’m trying to switch from Ubuntu, but oh well, maybe I should just stick with it after all.
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/rtw89-dkms-git.git
cd rtw89-dkms-git
makepkg -sri
Then you reboot, and the Wi-Fi does not work, and if you check sudo dmesg you are probably going to see the errors caused by that new driver.
If it causes the problems I mentioned - then you uninstall that AUR like this:
sudo pacman -Rs rtw89-dkms-git
Undo that blacklisting (you can just remove that /etc/modprobe.d/nowifi.conf file), and then reboot.
And in my case - the reboot couldn’t even shut down the system, it was getting stuck, so I had to force-shutdown by holding the power button.
Let me know if you’re having better luck, though.
Nope, I was actually on the LTS kernel already. Both LTS and the mainline kernels ship the same driver on EndeavourOS. openSUSE Tumbleweed ships that same driver.
By taking a closer look at the recent changes to the README.md here:
It seems like this new driver should be built against new 6.10 kernel once that will be released?
So, by checking out to some older commit it could be still possible to build a properly working driver now I guess…
Ubuntu works well on literally any kernel that is 5.16+. And non-Ubuntu-based Linux distros work worse. I tried Fedora (with multiple kernels), openSUSE, Arch. Pop!_OS works as well as Ubuntu. I did not try Debian.
And I think that is because they ship modified kernels with the good drivers already included.
I have been trying different stuff since the last spring, so for a year already. I did settle with Ubuntu for some time, but they keep breaking with the new releases (and I don’t modify pretty much anything) and that’s just not what I expect from the non-rolling release distro, where it seems like the only real option for stability is to stick with the 2 years old release. I might as well just use Debian at this point, I guess.
I installed the drivers using yay and blacklisted the wifi related modules. Since you mentioned that your wifi wasn’t working, I thought I’d just blacklist the bare minimum of drivers related to my driver name. But that didn’t help and I still don’t have working WiFi. Currently connected using Ethernet Cable.
