Wifi Adapter Not Recognized

[Matt Graham]

On 2021-04-22 12:44, AZ Pete via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> On 4/21/2021 5:37 PM, Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> On 2021-04-21 16:44, AZ Pete via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>>> I'm having a bear of a time getting my wireless card to work in a
>>> Linux Mint 20.1 machine.
>> (lshw output snipped)
>>>    *-network UNCLAIMED
>>>         description: Network controller
>>>         product: RT5592 PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
> When I do a "ifconfig -a" only etho and lo are displayed.

That's really odd, you should see eth0 if it's still on the old device 
names.  And I thought everything had switched to the new device names, 
so it should be enp4s0 or something like that.

>  "lsmod | grep rt2800" returns nothing.
>> thing should be supported by the rt2800pci module.  When you do
>> "lsmod | grep rt2800", do you see that?  If it's not there,
>> then modprobe it.

You didn't do "modprobe rt2800pci"?  I know people are in a big hurry 
and don't read carefully, but that should've been the first thing you 
tried.  Mint should be good about finding hardware, but sometimes things 
screw up.  If the modprobe worked, immediately after running the 
modprobe, you should see something like:

[34.5678] rt2800pci 0000:02:01.0: enabling device
[34.5678] rt2800pci 0000:02:01.0 wlp2s1 : renamed from wlan0

...in the output from dmesg.

Also, many wireless cards these days require firmware.[0]  Did you 
install that?  That should've been done as part of the initial install, 
but maybe it wasn't done for whatever reason.  No idea what Mint does, 
but the package should have "firmware" in its name.  The Debian package 
is called firmware-ralink so Mint's package will probably be named 
something similar.  You will have to tell Mint to allow non-Free 
software to install that.

> Any recommendations on which PCie-based wifi cards work well with
> Linux - that is "plug and chug" without having to jump through all
> these hoops.

The only thing you should have to do to get almost any wireless card 
working these days is install the firmware files and load the right 
module.  And then set it up with ESSID and password.

[0] Firmware these days is not GPL, so if you did something like "only 
install GPL, Apache, MIT, etc licensed stuff" then you won't have the 
firmware you need.

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