thinkpad x220 wireless problem
Hi!
I'm a newbie to Trisquel.And I have a problem with my thinkpad x220:the wireless don't work.The wireless adapter is Intel 82579LM.It runs with a open source driver e1000e.
Thanks
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"open source" doesn't mean free. It's another way of saying "I'm not really free or open, I just pretend to be". When "open source" people say free they often mean they don't charge for the software. They could care less beyond the practical implications and even then they often don't really care that much. Evidenced in the fact they accept proprietary bits and still call it "open source" despite it preventing users from being able to fix bugs, enhance code, add features, etc. The proprietary bits are often critical and the rest of the code is useless without it.
That's whats happening with your Intel wifi chip. That chip is dependent on proprietary bits that Trisquel doesn't include. So sure it's "open source", but it isn't free software. That is free as in libre or freedom/liberty.
If you care about freedom and liberty then the *only* solution is to stop using that hardware. There are options, but it involves replacing the wifi card.
but it involves replacing the wifi card.
Or buying a USB card compatible with Libre software (which I'm oretty sure is easier and has a much higher (i.e. 100%) success rate.
I am a member!
If you have a Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Sony, Apple, or Dell computer I'd definitely recommend going with a USB wifi adapter over a PCIE/M2 card as these companies use digital restrictions or other proprietary parts. If you have a Lenovo system with LibreBoot already then go with a mini PCIE card. That's the only exception for these companies. I'd generally recommend avoiding said companies for these reasons.
If you are technical and have another manufacturer's laptop your probably better off replacing the internal mini PCIE or M2 wifi card as there are other problems one can run into still with USB (however small of a chance it's smaller with mini PCIE and M2 on other brand laptops). The desktops are more of a toss up between PCI/PCIE and USB. I'd probably go with the PCI over PCIE as it seems to be less likely to run into a problem with (some manufacturers have non-standard PCIE slots which won't work with all PCIE cards and sometimes this is the only PCIE slot on a system).
The driver may be "open source"[1] but the firmware which is required for the driver to be able to do anything is proprietary. So intel wifi will not work.
1 If you're not familiar with this you should read it https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
Today I did 'sudo apt-get update' and 'sudo apt-get upgrade' on my Trisquel Lenovo X60. Now the there seems to be no modem. Is this the same problem? If so you had better warn people and direct them to the solution.
--update: I followed the post by iscutwo from 9/5 2015. I find the ath9x package already installed, and I find ath9x entries in lsmod. So is there something I need to do to tell it to work?
Two questions:
1) Do you mean a dial up modem or wireless Internet?
2) Do you have libreboot installed on the X60?
I'm talking about the wifi. I got this X60 from gluglug.org. It uses libreboot. It has been through 1 previous upgrade without causing a problem.
Could you provide a list of packages that you upgraded? The wifi driver lives in the kernel so maybe you could try a different version of linux-libre.
Does apt-get keep a record of what it does in /var/lib/dpkg/status (or somewhere else)? I'll send you that if you want, or if you tell me how I'll look for what's interesting in it. It's around 45000 lines.
Before going through all that, maybe you can first try and install a more recent kernel, for example version 3.16 from the official repo.
You'll find logs in /var/log/
I'm going away for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, some more info: kernel on the X60 is 3.13.0-15-generic #84+7.0trisquel2 SMP.
Our tech guy made the wifi antenna LED come on by using 'ifconfig wlan0 up', and now it boots up with that LED lit, but it won't find any connections. The response to 'mmcli -L' is 'No modems were found'.
--later--
Our tech guy has fixed it!
Some time back, following a post on Raspberry Pi forum about connecting to eduroam, I had added stuff to /etc/network/interfaces. That apparently was wrong; we have taken that out. Nick installed rfkill and did something with that. And there was something else he did that I didn't follow. Anyway, now wifi is working and it connects to eduroam.
'mmcli -L' still says 'No modems were found' even when I am online.
'rfkill list' shows 0: phy0: Wireless LAN