Arch Linux

Faucheuse

Member

Registered: 2016-10-26

Posts: 9

Installation on wireless laptop

Hello,
After training on a VM I want to install Arch on my laptop.
The problem is it has no ethernet plug. And the wifi doesn't seem to work (I tried with wifi menu).
Is there any chance it will work if I buy a USB/Ethernet switch, or does Arch installation won't recognize what it is ?

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,523

Website

Re: Installation on wireless laptop

There is no way to answer this as you haven't provided any relevant information.  What does "doesn't seem to work" mean?

What is the wireless hardware?  What (if any) driver is in use?

The most likely answer is it will be fine once arch is installed as you can install the needed drivers which are not present on the iso.  You can probably even install these in the iso envornment too if prefered - especially if you still have the vm as you can download and build them into a proper arch package, then just install that in the iso environment.

But this is all just wild speculation until you provide some actual information.

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,774

Re: Installation on wireless laptop

My favorite way to approach this is to USB tether a phone.  The tethered phone appears as a USB wired Ethernet -- all you need to do is run dhcpcd from the install media.
The phone will provide NAT forwarding to whatever wireless network it is attached to.   If you don't care about data usage, go ahead and use LTE, G3, whatever.  OTOH, if the phone is associated with a WiFi network, the phone will (generally [1]) forward to that.  Do the base install and install the WiFi drivers.  Then you can use the WiFi and drop the tether.

[1] Some carriers *cough*T-Mobile*cough*, for some inexplicable reason, force you off of WiFi and onto their wireless data when you tether.  This might be because the assume you are going to create a wireless tether and will need the WiFi for the access point and they are trying to make it simple.  I cannot really think of a good reason otherwise.

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Inixi

Member

Registered: 2016-10-15

Posts: 54

Re: Installation on wireless laptop

In my example I used a USB Ethernet adapter and it worked.

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