[Assist] Wifi card not recognized

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2020 18:34:58 +0200
"Xavier B." <somenxavier at posteo.net> wrote:

> After installing parabola in 686 machine, the network card (wifi) is
> not recognized. During installation, parabola recognizes it. How can
> I triage and solve this problem.
You need to look at which driver is used.

Many drivers simply don't work because they require nonfree firmware
which have not yet been replaced by free software.

If the driver is one that is known to work with free software, then we
need to investigate more to understand what is going wrong.

There is a simple way to check which driver is used, if you already
know the WiFi interface name. This work with most drivers as the ones
requiring a firmwares still creates an interface without the firmware.

The "ls /sys/class/net/" command can show the list of interfaces.

For instance:
> # ls /sys/class/net/
> eth0  lo  usb0  wlan1  wlp1s0

Then you can look at which driver is used with a single command. For
instance if your interface is "wlan1" you can use the
"readlink /sys/class/net/wlan1/device/driver" command.

So here I tried that as root on an ARM computer and it gave me that:
> # readlink /sys/class/net/wlan1/device/driver
> ../../../../../../../../../../bus/usb/drivers/r8188eu

So the driver is r8188eu which is not supported.

As that driver isn't supported, I added another WiFi card in that
device. Here's the same command for the other WiFi card:
> # readlink /sys/class/net/wlp1s0/device/driver
> ../../../../../../../bus/pci/drivers/ath9k

So here that driver is supported.

Denis.
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