Thank you very much for the clarification. It seems that the (non-free)
firmware is not absolutely necessary for those cards.
Next, I may want to find a Realtek card and see whether it works with Debian
testing with deblobbed Linux 4.16.x kernel.
Once I heard that certain Realtek WLAN adapters do work on free/libre
distributions like Trisquel. Does this mean that such models have been
"reverse engineered" (i.e. free firmware available)?
Yeah, you download the .deb, copy the file to the machine, and do sudo dpkg
-i /path/to/file
Never mind. He says WiFi is working now, from a new location. Maybe it was a
problem with the access points he was trying. Sorry for the noise.
When I have a chance to look at his computer I'll look into whether or not the
working WiFi is a freedom issue.
signature.asc
Description: PGP
> Similar behavior was reported in January by Magic Banana:
> https://trisquel.info/fr/forum/testing-trisquel-8-upgrade-process#comment-125668
Thanks. It seems that the conclusion in that thread was that the WiFi card
should not have worked in Trisquel. Maybe jxself's suggestion of trying 4.16
> I guess the first question is what changed between yesterday and today?
> Because something clearly did.
> It would be good to check through the logs to see what is happening.
I agree, but he can't recall any changes, and he's out of town and can only
communicate by text message, so
I guess the first question is what changed between yesterday and today?
Because something clearly did.
It would be good to check through the logs to see what is happening.
It's also possible that 4.16 and newer might restore functionality:
Similar behavior was reported in January by Magic Banana:
https://trisquel.info/fr/forum/testing-trisquel-8-upgrade-process#comment-125668
A few weeks ago I installed Trisquel 8 on a friend's laptop. His Realtek
RTL8188EE Wireless card was immediately detected and worked fine until
yesterday. NetworkManager still detects the card, but no wireless access points
show up in nm-applet or nmcli. This is the first case I've encountered
