I have here a Lenovo laptop labelled "IdeaPad S12" which is currently running Linux Mint 16. It works surprisingly well, except that whenever I open the lid, there's about a 50% chance that the wifi won't work. A little broken-cable icon appears down by the clock at the bottom right, and no amount of clicking on the "enable networking" option in the associated popup menu will actually make the wifi work again. Even the most diehard fans are usually willing to accept that linux has not historically been great at wifi, and this situation actually represents something of an advance on what things are usually like - I find it normally takes a lot of messing about with package management and then it works only after a cold boot. But it'd be nice to clear this fault: is there anything I could try? Preferably from the subset of "anything" that doesn't require typing war and peace into a shell? P
If there is a solution it's going to be command line based. Otherwise you could replace the wifi card with a known working unit. There's a thing called NDIS wrapper that uses Windows xp drivers in Linux. But that's all command line I believe. I had similar issues on my old acer. It took a couple of ubuntu releases for everything to get sorted driverwise. Even then it always performed much better under vista. Laptops are a bit hit and miss. If I was going for laptop again it would be linux based but I would do extensive research to find something that works all round.
Yeah, me too. I've been avoiding linux on laptops for years, and people keep telling me it's all fixed and my concerns are outdated. But, er, no. P
What happens if you use the Code: ifconfig wlan0 down then Code: ifconfig wlan0 up after the problem occurs Does that do anything?
Do you know the make and model of the wlan card? It may be easier to determine, I know in some of my limited experience with Ubuntu that there is a section that allows you to install restricted drivers within gnome guide somewhere, sometimes there are additional things there that may help. I assume that you have all the latest updates? Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
Both those commands return "wlan0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device". No, I have no idea what sort of hardware it is. We did a bunch of stuff post-install which I seem to recall had the effect of making the wifi work but I have no idea what they were. P
For linux I find intel wifi has the best native support and function, followed by ralink and atheros. Chips from others are spotty or nonexistent support. Looking at the specs for your laptop model it seems it's most likely to have a broadcom wifi (though they also seemed to have shipped it with intel as well, though given it's not working properly I expect it isn't. You can find out in the device properties with the pciven)... which do have spotty support on linux for the majority of their chips. I would suggest to exchange it for an intel wifi.
Hm, well, it's not like I have much choice at this point - the laptop has what it is. It's not like wifi is even a very young technology anymore. This shouldn't be difficult, you'd have thought. P
It is not the wifi which is the problem, but the suspend/resume part. And WiFi might not be a young technology, but your adapter could be.
Well, okay, but how does that help? Surely they'd have tested it before releasing it? Wifi being a core tech on laptops? P
You can usually change the wifi card. I did this on my NC10 to get 802.11n. Just a case of unplugging the old card, and plugging the new one in. Biggest headache is probably just getting to the card in the first place.
in terminal under sudo lsmod to list modules. Find the module name for the wifi_gpio Then run modprobe (module name). I've had to scrip this on startup with a board I'm playing about with at the moment, the wifi would only spring into life 1/3 boots.
Nope, nothing. The only thing I can find in the output of lsmod that seems to have anything to do with wifi is "lib80211", but there is no indication of what exactly that does, how it's configured, what it's attached to, etc. P
You need to add the network init script to your acpid handler script when the laptop lid open/close event is triggered. Mine is located in /etc/acpi/default.sh and the network script is /etc/init.d/net.wlan0. What you don't need to do is buy new hardware. Good luck. Here is a basic acpi script to help you find the correct event... #!/bin/bash set $* group=${1%%/*} action=${1#*/} device=$2 id=$3 value=$4 echo "$group" echo "$action" echo "$device" echo "$id" case "$group" in ibm) case "$device" in lid) case "$action" in open) /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 restart ;; *);; esac ;; *);; esac ;; *);; esac If you tail your log and make sure your acpid is running you can modify the group/device/action to meet that of your system.
Also do first make sure the networking script can bring up your card correctly. You can do this by doing iwlist wlan0 scan to see what networks are around you (wlan0) is your card. Failing that you need to load the modules as others have mentioned and make sure you have the firmware for your card (if required).
I never did manage to fix this, possibly because I have no idea what tailing my log involves (some sort of pin-the-tail-on-the-treestump party game?) nor what an acpid is, whether I have one, or whether it is running, walking, or having a nice sit-down. Even the harshest critic would have to accept, at this point, that we're degenerating rapidly into the normal Linux alphabetti spaghetti mess which makes anything to do with the OS such a massive headache. And yeah, I really would actually like to fix it. Probably Linux Mint 16, being at least four days old, is considered laughably outdated in Linux terms, so I suspect the first step would be to reinstall the OS entirely. According to the "all versions" part of the Mint site, I currently have the choice of Mint Rebecca Ubuntu Trusty, Mint Quana Ubuntu Trusty, Mint Maya Ubuntu Precise, or Mint Debian Debian Testing. Which is rather like Microsoft calling the next version Windows OSX 10 XP, as far as I can tell. P
I don't get it phil. You seem to berate linux but you are talking about installing it / updating it. Surely you should just pack it in?
If he packed it in we wouldn't have anyone to laugh at though. Heaven forbid that Phil could learn something about computers, it would spoil my amazement that someone using Linux doesn't even know what ACPI is, even though it's been around for over 15 years.
