I’m on vacation in Argentina with my 13. Been working fine since new and all of a sudden I have no wifi. I’ve checked the community and seems it’s a firmware issue. I’m not Terminal-savvyand because I’m away I can’t take it to my local guy. I AM in Cordoba so there’s a slim chance I can find a tech shop familiar with Linux but what a great way to spend your vacation…
Is there a moron-friendly way to fix it?
What distro and kernel, what’s in the logs,and do you have network access (ethernet or usb-to-ethernet, for example) or some other means such as sneakernet from another machine to get updated files onto the machine if needed? If it was working previously, what changed?
Sorry:
Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS 64-bit
When I said I’m not terminal-savvy I wasn’t kidding. I’m not a coder nor much of a computer guy. I know some basics. I was an Apple guy that got tired of Apple’s BS.
No, I’m on vacation - I don’t have anything with my to do anything not the knowledge. Consider yourself talking to a helpless tech-baby
I don’t know what happened - it was working, then it wasn’t. I think the gal at the house he said that they were working on power in the street so perhaps it got a spike something?..
Have you tried a reboot? In particular, try an EC reboot by holding the power button for 10-15 seconds until all the LEDs turn off and then back on.
No worries, there’s a wealth of knowledge from helpful people on this board. I have benefitted from it more times than I can count. As @Morpheus636 says, trying the EC reboot and, if that doesn’t work, then you can try powering off the machine, unplugging it for two minutes, plugging it back in, and powering it on to see if that helps.
If neither of those works, then we can dig into what we can find from the terminal (and to be clear, I will have to go look up those commands, as I don’t recall the exact ones or the syntax, and if it is different on Ubuntu than the distro that I am running). At some point we may get engagement from one of the many linux gurus floating around here, but I will try to muddle through for now.
Sorry that this happened, hopefully you are able to get it resolved.
If you have a linux running, try booting into an old kernel. You can do that on the grub prompt, advance boot options and choose the previous kernel.
I remember that there were some kernels on ubuntu 22.04.x where some functionality was not running (notably also WiFi).
Again, “I’m not Terminal-savvy and because I’m away I can’t take it to my local guy…
Is there a moron-friendly way to fix it?”
Unfortunately I can’t do any of that because you’re talking a different language to me. If you gave me step by step instructions I might be able to do it - I know how to open Terminal and type but that’s about it.
In fact, if you don’t see the boot loader, it is because you have only 1 OS installed and they disabled the timeout in your boot loader.
Unfortunately for you, there is no easy way to fix this with just a “click”.
So either you change the grub defaults file to include a timeout so you see the boot options, or you need to find someone to do it for you.
The file I’m talking about is:
/etc/default/grub
If you feel it, open a console, and in that console,
you have to type 5 commands into the console exactly as these are there.
sudo -i
echo "GRUB_TIMEOUT=5" >> /etc/default/grub
echo "GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu" >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub
exit
after that reboot your machine.
Once it boots, it will show you the boot menu for 5 seconds. That’s when you can actually choose to use the advance menu, and choose an old kernel to boot.
When doing it, it would look like the below:
smurphy@jupiter:~$ sudo -i
root@jupiter:~# echo "GRUB_TIMEOUT=5" >> /etc/default/grub
root@jupiter:~# echo "GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu" >> /etc/default/grub
root@jupiter:~# update-grub
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/99_breeze-grub.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /boot/grub/themes/framework-hidpi/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-6.8.0-47-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-47-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-6.8.0-45-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-45-generic
Found memtest86+ 64bit EFI image: /boot/memtest86+x64.efi
Warning: os-prober will not be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Systems on them will not be added to the GRUB boot configuration.
Check GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER documentation entry.
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
done
exit
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I had the same problem twice and I fixed it by removing and installing the WiFi card
Kinda like the USB-A accessory ports (or whatever they’re called) going ‘dead’ huh?.. just need pulling off and replacing to get working again… too bad I left my torx tool at home - can you remind me what size it is so I can buy one here…
Like what @lbkNhubert said, is there not a series of terminal commands you can type to see what the system recognizes? The dumbed down version in Windows is to open the Device Manager and see what it shows as detected. Presumably there is a series of commands that can give you the same information in Linux.
I thought I had seen someone paste some text from a terminal window about the WiFi card after issuing a command it the OS spits out what card, who makes, it version numbers, etc. Not sure if searching in Google for “linux terminal command for wifi card properties” would bring up anything useful. It would tell you if it sees the card in the first place. If it does not show up the WiFi card maybe bough its one-way ticket to Argentina.
Although smaller, that bit is fairly common and a hardware store might have a torx set you could purchase if you wanted to perform some vacation disassembling to try reseating the card. I would see if it shows up in Linux in the first place. If it shows up to the system at least you know it is connected and trying to work.
Let us know how it goes. (Great time to be more tech free while in Argentina, though that is not what you were planning of course)
Ha, nice idea but it’s my go-to for more involved planning - phone screens are annoyingly small - and I much prefer to type than phone text for extended periods
Ya, I’m going to try to find the bit or driver. I installed the unit so have no issues checking it
I will give the terminal a shot asap.
Cheers
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Hi,
The terminal command is:
lspci
Type that and copy/paste the output here.
That will tell us if the hardware is faulty.
Also please do:
sudo dmesg
and post that output to pastebin.com or something like that.
That will tell us which bit of the firmware is failing.
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If you just want to see if there is a WiFi card installed, and enabled, issuing a:
$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
enxd8d0902425b6 no wireless extensions.
wlp5s0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"Access_Denied_5Ghz"
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.2 GHz Access Point: B8:69:F4:F5:1D:D1
Bit Rate=780 Mb/s Tx-Power=3 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=62/70 Signal level=-48 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
helps. But if the network card driver didn’t find the card, it won’t help.
Thing is, if we know which driver is being used, we can check with modinfo what it looks like and what options we could provide the driver to give us more information.
lol, ok… so it turns out that if the switch at the top of the WiFi window of Settings accidentally somehow gets switched to off then instead of just saying ‘WiFi Off’ it says ‘No WiFi adapter detected’… over-dramatic much!!!.. Instead of having the WiFi switch in the same place as the Airplane Mode switch someone decided it was better to put it in another less-obvious, less-intuitive place…
Anyway, I don’t know how/why it got turned off but that’s the issue.
Sorry for wasting everyone’s time.
Have great days
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