The thing is, there's "iwd" and "wpa_supplicant". You use either one or the other, but not both. Sources like the Gentoo handbook will tell you that but, not all Wiki's do as good a job of pointing that out <...looking directly at you Arch...>.
I don’t understand anything to do with network configuration, I just install a few packages (iwd and wpa_supplicant included), start a few services, run a few commands, and hope it magically works after rebooting
Possibly. Some XPS models (~9310) cheaped out on the WiFi chipset, which was really bad at reconnecting after sleep/suspend on Win 10/11 right out off the box.
Tried a live Linux install and it worked perfectly, so made the switch as there was no Win-only software that I needed.
The very evening I installed Linux for the first time (I think it was Ubuntu 12.04), my Wifi stick was the first major hurdle. I was a teenager, had no idea about package managers and such, but the drivers for my stick were only available in an uncompiled format, so I had to first learn what build utils and kernel dev packages were, download them and their dependencies onto the windows PC of my dad and copy them onto a CD.
After I had figured all that out (took me.a while), I learned how to compile on the fly.
After I had run ./configure and it finallyfinally ran through without error, the config script had this last line:
Configure done successfully. Now type 'make' and pray
Things have changed over the years, but they haven't changed enough.
Yep, been in the same boat 😂. Was an LTS fan for a long long time till I realized… this shit ain’t worth it 😂.
Everthing there is out there in 99% of the cases compiles against latest libraries. And well, LTS is just… lagging behind 🤷. So, you solve one lib dependcy and then, bam, another one pops up… OK, solved that one, bam, another one 😒… it just gets frustrating to compile stuff on LTS.
And then you get all sorts of errors from the package manager cuz you did the unthinkable - install latest libs on an LTS distro.
LTS is good for one thing only nowadays - servers.
Compiling starts to work rather well once you've done it a few times. Especially when you get more used to understanding what ./configure tries to tell you. You should really try to get behind that, since you Linux will
I’ve only had problems with wifi drivers twice, immediately after clean-installing fedora 38 on two different devices. Plugging my device into ethernet and updating fixed it instantly.
Not sure about iPhones, but I’ve used an android phone a couple times to both USB tether with data and to act as a WiFi receiver to download drivers in a pinch.
Use a second computer or a friend’s one to download the updates, get a USB ethernet adapter (a 100mbps one is like $5), put the system drive in a computer with lan, tether with another device via USB (phone, pi zero, etc) or use a different version/distro. I’m sure there are a bunch of other solutions.
I guess an ethernet to USB adapter might be your next best bet.
Alternatively, you could USB tether your phone if you have a good data plan
If you are in the unlikely event that you don’t have ethernet port to plug your device into, and no cell service, such as I was, you can use a spare wireless AP to get wifi if you’ve got one
I haven’t had any recent issue with those either. Just make sure both the nvidia driver and the kernel are from your distros repository, and you always update them both at the same time.
My new laptop has a nvidia card in it. One time it stopped working after a update so I downgraded the drivers so I can wait entail the next update they do work. Besides that it have worked great. I am on fedora so rpmfusion is where the drivers are from.
It’s been so much better…but I’m steeling myself to track down a WiFi direct bug that keeps disconnecting due to a timeout after 10 seconds. Linus give me strength!
I have a Retropie and I use wpa_supplicant to manage my connection there. It looks like this: the router is downstairs and I use a repeater in the room next to the Retropie to have better wifi coverage upstairs. The router itself is reachable, but the signal strength is worse. So, as a fallback, I put both the router and the repeater connection in my wpa_supplicant config file with the router having a lower priority. Still, sometimes my retropie clings onto the worse connection for some reason and there is no way to change it but to do a complete reboot. If I just restart the wifi with ifdown and ifup, it will either not reconnect to any wifi at all or reconnect to the shittier connection again, it’s kinda a fifty-fifty. A reboot will always properly choose the best signal tho and I am very confused why this is happening. Any ideas?
The repeater uses a fixed channel (I think I set it to 7 or 8) and the router is set to automatic channel selection. Do you think fixing the router’s channel would help?
See if they’re overlapping, do a survey with your phone and WiFiAnalyzer (or another app). If they’re close or overlapping, set the router to a fixed channel as well.
Set your wpa_supplicant to use the BSSID of the repeater’s access point and don’t put the SSID in the conf file. Then it will connect to only the repeater.
If the repeater just re-transmits tho main AP’s BSSID and packets, you need a better setup. Cheap WiFi extenders do this and almost always cause collisions, making the overall speed slow at all points.
It’s insane how I just had this problem today. Had to tear out my network card in my Asus VivoBook 16. The drivers aren’t out for the MediaTek network card so I had to change it to an Intel one that I previously used.
LPT: Swapping Wifi modules is (sometimes at least) stupidly easy to do. I had a shitty
Trigger WarningRealtek wifi card
and bought an Intel card to replace it for about 30 bucks. Begone random disconnects and packet drops. Note that this was on a laptop and it was still just an issue of removing a few screws and swapping modules.
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