Hello Tran Duc Minh,
Tran Duc Minh dijo [Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 05:15:30PM +0300]:
Dear Debian Community,
I have a question about Wi-Fi support on older Debian releases.
If my laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi is not supported by Debian 11 or 12, is it
possible to use a USB Wi-Fi adapter during installation to get internet
access?
Please note that this is not the right mailing list;
[email protected] mainly deals with organizational aspects of
the Debian project. For user support, please ask in
[email protected] instead.
Are there any USB Wi-Fi chipsets or models that are known to work well out
of the box with these older Debian versions?
I would be very grateful for any suggestions or recommendations.
My experience is that hardware support from the debian-installer was
greatly increased with the Debian 12 release, due to the project's decision
to enable the inclusion of non-free firmware. My (very limited!) experience
is that Debian 12 onwards supports all of the wireless firmware I have
tried to install it with.
Do note as well that Debian's latest Stable release is 13 ("Trixie"). If
you are performing a new install, I suggest you try with this newer
release. Of course, your mail's subject mentions "with older Debian
versions"; hardware requirements don't change as much in the Linux
ecosystem as they do under Windows (in my household, our media servers are
still >10 year old laptops, and they work perfectly under Debian 13). Of
course, if you have specific reasons to install older releases... Go ahead
🙂
Greetings,
– Gunnar.
