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Hello,
I've been trying to install Arch Linux on my Toshiba Satellite A505 for a while now (almost a year) and have had no luck. This following problem could have a very obvious answer or be impossible. I don't know, I've been so wrapped up in it that I'm starting to disorient myself as to what I should do.
My wireless has proved quite the obstical. The advice given in the beginners guide didn't solve the problem nor did the troubleshooting in the Wireless Setup article. I've also looked at some forum threads from people with related problems (such as this one), but all seem to take a solution route that is impossible for me. I don't have a means of connecting to the internet as wireless is my only option. When I did have ethernet available to me, I was able to connect perfectly following the beginners guide. I simply put eth0 into the rc.conf and started dhcpcd. But my wireless is different.
During my install, I made sure I had wireless_tools and wpa_supplicant. I selected the base and the base_dev. I also installed linux_firmware.
My rc.conf has wlan0 for its interface.
When I enter dhcpcd wlan0 I get:
# dhcpcd wlan0
: version 5.2.12 starting
: wlan0: waiting for carrier
: timed outAssuming something isn't working with my wireless, I proceed to the Wireless Setup article:
# lspci | grep -i net
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Ethernet controller (rev 02)
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8191SEvB Wireless LAN Controller (rev 10)iwconfig output for those curious:
# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:onRTL8191SE is not the most supported driver out there. I can't see it in the list of the supported wireless cards. And the article even singles it out:
rtl8192s
The driver is part of the current kernel package. Firmware may need to be added manually if /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU/rtl8192sfw.bin does not exist. (dmesg will report "rtl819xU:FirmwareRequest92S(): failed" if the firmware is missing)
Followed the instructions provided...
# mkdir /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU # tar -xzOf rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009.tar.gz \ rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009/firmware/RTL8192SE/rtl8192sfw.bin > \ /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU/rtl8192sfw.bin
....and it didn't work. Is there a significant difference between RTL8192SU and RTL8191SE? The article seems to place them into the rtl8192s family as if their differences are irrelevant. I'm going to attempt to install the other firmware (this time RTL8191SE firmware), but I feel it's worth asking whether I'm missing something obvious here. Like I said in the beginning, I've been working on this on and off for a while now with not success and I feel like there is something important missing. I've never succeeded in setting up wireless on Arch, so I don't know what the proper path should look like. If there are any additional commands whose output would help flesh this out, please ask so that I can add them to the thread. Help towards a solution to this problem would be greatly appreciated since this is the ONLY thing holding me back from using Arch outside of the virtual box. I hope this newbie problem doesn't comes off as lacking in effort. I'm trying to solve this myself, but I feel like I'm trying to solve a labyrinth with no clear sense of direction.
Thanks!
Last edited by R09UE-RAVEN (2012-05-18 20:55:11)
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You don't need any special firmware handling, the linux-firmware package has what's necessary.
That said, you didn't provide any info about actually trying to connect to a wireless network. rc.conf is only for wired networks, for which it's enough to just run dhcpcd. But wireless requires steps to create a connection, before you get to the dhcpcd part. Doing those steps manually isn't that hard, but to make things easier, look into netcfg, wicd or networkmanager.
Also, the device name isn't the interesting part, it's pretty much irrelevant. The pci-id is the one that counts. That one you get with lspci -nn
Last edited by Gusar (2012-05-14 21:15:50)
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Thanks for your response!
I left out my wireless network information primarily because I never reached that step in the setup. I was convinced that my firmware was missing and that skipping the step was an idiotic thing to do. Thanks to your comment, I'm working under the assumption that the firmware is all there and that wireless management should work now. I'm making progress now and the issues I'm now facing seem much more mundane and common (still sifting through the information out there on netcfg.) I'm not sure whether I should mark this as solved yet. For speculative purposes, I'm pretty sure that this problem is solved as my current issues are related to getting my network controller to connect to an encrypted network rather than getting my network controller to work at all.
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This problem was a case of user error and is solved. I got wireless working upon realizing that I was trying to solve a problem that had already been solved for me. As Gusar pointed out, the wireless card should (and did in my case) work out of the box with linux-firmware installed. I then simply skipped down to part II of the wireless setup and followed the steps for the appropriate encryption (WPA/WPA2 in my case). I ended up manually connecting by simply configuring my wpa_supplicant as laid out in it's article. I followed the directions to the dot and had no issues. This thread will be marked as solved.
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