Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
Want to use my old laptop like a Chromebook. Went for cr OS.
Installed fine but won't see my wireless, which renders it all a bit useless for its intended purpose.
Based on OpenSuse 12.2. Have googled the issue but even for a Linux (Ubuntu) user for the last 7 years the solutions are all a bit opaque.
Anyone got any ideas? All the distros I've tried before this have automatically seen the network, but this one doesn't even appear to know there's any wireless there to see.
Or, any other ideas for a lightweight (really only need the ability to run Chrome/Chromium) distro to try that's fairly foolproof?
boot it, open a terminal
type
lspci | egrep -i "(wire|net)"
what does that say..
I've always used one of the light versions (like Mint XFCE) of Mint (which is Ubuntu based).
Wifi can be a bit fun in Linux! I have found using the windows drivers with NDIS Wrapper to generally work: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Ndiswrapper
All I'm getting is -
lspci: command not found
/usr/sbin/lspci | egrep -i "(wire|net)"
try that
failing that type
which lspci
and it'll tell you path to it (I've guessed the path to be /usr/sbin/).. assuming its installed.. I'd be surprised/horrified if it wasn't
Hmmmnnn.
Get 'no such file or directory' for the first one, and
'no lspci in (massive long garbled directory address)' for the second.
Xubuntu with Chrome or Chromium installed is pretty lightweight and will likely support your wifi card without faffing.
I'll join the chorus suggesting some flavour of Ubuntu which isn't Ubuntu (hate the UI of that). I like lubuntu for something really minimal, though suggestions above are also good.
Having said that, I've had a lot less hassle getting Wifi working on my RPi which runs a Debian variant than I did on Ubuntu.
I share your pain. I have a very old Dell laptop with a Turion chip. Won't run the latest versions of Mint but will run Ubuntu 12.10. Spent best part of an evening trying to get wireless to work with no luck despite following guidance and rebooting several times. Gave up in disgust and next time I switched on it promptly asked for the network password and rapidly connected. Don't bother to ask, I have no idea why.
Gave up on the SUSE based distro and tried lubuntu. Installed like a dream but no wireless. 3 hours of faffing, googling and following various guides and still no wireless.
Grrrrrrr.
I'm guessing that maybe your wifi card lacks Linux support? Try googling its name and some relevant Linux terms and see if anyone else has had problems?
With mine it's a known issue. Just that the fixes aren't working.
I'm trying to do the same thing, but I think I'm going to go for for Mint or Lubuntu with a load of crap uninstalled.