Wifi Adapter Not Recognized

[Matt Graham]

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. [...] all hardware works fine in Windows.
> When I boot Linux it looks to me like it's not able to find the
> card. This card is a few years old
> 
> What does "network UNCLAIMED" mean?
(lshw output snipped)
>    *-network UNCLAIMED
>         description: Network controller
>         product: RT5592 PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

You should see 2 network devices with "ifconfig -a", do you?  grepping 
through the kernel sources for RT5592 says that this 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.  If it is, how 
are you managing your nyetwork on this machine?  Lots of distros use 
"Network Manager", which is a giant PITA, but is "friendly", whatever 
that means.  Go into your nyetwork manager and configure it so that it 
knows what ESSID to connect to and what the password is.  Alternatively, 
make sure that you've got wpa_supplicant installed and just add the 
configuration info to wpa_supplicant.conf and restart wpa_supplicant .

Also, UNCLAIMED is not necessarily a bad thing.  If I do lshw here, I 
see that a camera I have plugged in is UNCLAIMED.  This is because it's 
a PTP digital camera, so it is claimed by no kernel module, but it is 
supported in userspace with gtkam/libusb.  Your network card should 
probably not be like that though.

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