[SOLVED] Lubuntu newbie question

VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 13 points –

I recently took the toe dip of installing Lubuntu (22.04.2 LTS Jammy Jellyfish) on my old laptop.

I'm generally happy with how everything runs almost immeasurably better on it than with windows 10, but I have one significant issue: I can't for the life of me figure out how to make wireless internet work in it.

I can get online just fine plugging in my ethernet cable or doing USB tethering from my phone, but my phone doesn't have unlimited data and I sometimes leave my apartment, so it's not exactly ideal..

Anyone able to help or point me to someone/something that can?

10

Hey there. Some wifi chipsets need special drivers under linux. Which laptop do you have?

Edit: if it is an internal chipset you can find out which one exactly via lspci in a terminal

Hi! It's a HP Envy and ironically I'd have to reinstall Windows to tell you more specifically without further information..

Except it's old. We're talking so old that a hardware benchmarking site said that the graphics card performance is "terrible" and the only thing in the pro column of their review was "consistency". That's consistently terrible, mind you 😂

Oops, got a bit sidetracked there! My apologies!

No problem. As my edit above says, you can find out the exact chipset model this way:

  1. Open a Terminal Emulator (xterm, kitty, konsole, yakuake....)
  2. Enter lspci
  3. Find the wifi chipset in the output (probably realtek) or post the output here if you have trouble finding it
  4. Search for [chipset name] ubuntu drivers
  5. There will be results with specific instructions for your chipset

So, it doesn't show any WiFi?

What make/model is your computer?

It's able to log onto my wifi but acts like it doesn't have access to the Internet through it. It's an ancient HP Envy..

Did you enable third-party drivers during installation? Realtek is historically very closed-source about Linux support and a pain in general.

I don't think I did, no.. should I have? Even getting past the brainfart of forgetting a crucial keyword (realtek), I'm still not having much luck with whatever I can find online..