Realtek RTL8188CE wireless problem
My Realtek RTL8188CE wireless card on my laptop won't work in Trisquel. I checked on h-node.org and found out it is incompatible with free software. I want to get on the internet on this thing. It worked in other distros with no non-free software installed, so i think it is run by non-free Linux Kernel Module that is not included in Linux-Libre. Is there any way to get this wireless working on this laptop with only free software?
Thanks in advance.
The driver is distributed under the GPL... but the firmware is proprietary. To run free, you will need to acquire another Wifi card (or a Wifi dongle, especially if your laptop vendor practice "treacherous computing").
It is very hard to know if a card that never ran will be handled by Linux-libre. The model alone is not enough because the manufacturers frequently replace the chipset of a given model. One strategy that works for sure is to buy the card/dongle from ThinkPenguin. By using the subsequent link, 25% of the benefits on your purchase are donated to the Trisquel project: http://libre.thinkpenguin.com
Thanks, Magic Banana, i'll look into the ThinkPenguin USB wifi adapters.
I got a dongle for my laptop and it was I think a Realtek8919 model, it has worked great. I've had it over a year now and it still works.
I am a member!
On Trisquel? I think your mistaken.
The N & G USB chipsets that are supported in Trisquel are:
RTL8187/RTL8187B/RTL8187L/AR9170 and AR9271/AR7010/AR9280 will be... shortly (requires firmware install still, unless this changed, and I missed the announcement, jxself?).
For N mini pcie / mini pcie half height wireless N cards Trisquel supports:
Most atheros chipsets and at least one broadcom (braodcom not advisable though, developer disclaims its use, though some Trisquel users are using it, soo... take that for what it is). There are some cards though I'd recommend against due to a combination chipsets of which one chipset is dependent on non-free firmware. There are other chipsets (non-N) from atheros which are also very poor quality or lack power management support (from the G days).
Also of note is that all these cards are not necessarily supported (out of the box anyway) which have these chipsets. Some cards use different IDs so the drivers/firmware don't know to load.
I'm 99.995% confident there are no N Realtek chipsets supported under Trisquel. They are all dependent on non-free software so unless you manually installed something... it won't work. If you did manually install something non-free I hope you understand that this was undesirable. It defeats the purpose of going with a 100% free operating system. This is also something this community would advise against. It is the one thing everybody agrees on here.
If your going to advise people to install non-free software please do it somewhere else. It is contrary to this projects/communities goals. Such actions are hostile on a free software forum. And I think this community would agree... period.