Kubuntu 19.10 and Sony Vaio Wifi issue

[walk5]

New day new issue (at least it seems).

Finally have my husband laptop up and running. Thanks to the awesome help here. Now I can focus on my son's laptop. He has a Sony Vaio with Kubuntu 19.10 installed. All of his programs are working great. One big issue is his wifi does not work. I have to hardwire to his laptop for him to access the internet or install or update. His wifi worked when running on windows but as soon as I loaded Kubuntu it stopped. There is no slider or button on the laptop to disable. Including no function button.

I did an internet search and was not able to understand what to do to fix it. Learning daily but still fairly new to linux. Please help. He is driving me crazy to fix it.

Thanks in advance.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, to start with, it would be interesting to see the output of
inxi -Nxx
and
ifconfig

(if the packages (net-tools and inxi) are not installed, it's a good thing to have them. ;·)

[claydoh]

We would need to see which wifi chip he has on the laptop, and then find if there is a way to get it to work

First, go to System Settings, and open the Driver Manager and see if it offers anything for wifi drivers. Report if it shows anything

If not, open Konsole, and ener the command lspci

Copy the results here. This will show some hardware info, including the wifi card. It will looks similar to this:

[FONT=monospace][COLOR=#54FF54][B]claydoh@claydoh-Pavilion590[/B][/COLOR][COLOR=#000000]:[/COLOR][COLOR=#5454FF][B]~[/B][/COLOR][COLOR=#000000]$ lspci[/COLOR]
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 07)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 07)
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller (rev 10)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM (rev 10)
00:14.5 SD Host controller: Intel Corporation Device a375 (rev 10)
00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device a368 (rev 10)
00:15.1 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device a369 (rev 10)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller (rev 10)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SATA AHCI Controller (rev 10)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a33c (rev f0)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a33e (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port 9 (rev f0)
00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device a328 (rev 10)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation H370 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X] (rev c7)
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 580]
[COLOR=#ff0000][B]02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
[/B][/COLOR]03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
04:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Sandisk Corp Device 5002

[/FONT]

We can use this to see what card you have, which will help us find what might need to be done to get it working.
Most networking devices are well supported in Linux, but a few need to have third party driver packages installed, or (worst case, and fairly rare) require building from source code.

[GreyGeek]

If push comes to shove you can always use a USB wifi which is supported by the 5.4 kernel.
https://www.amazon.com/BrosTrend-120...tronics&sr=1-3

[Don B. Cilly]

True, but I have a really small TP-link one I paid less than €10 for, it works just fine.

[EDIT] It's about as big as my thumb's nail, and plugs-and-plays on both 5.3(and earlier) and 5.4 kernels.
Inxi see it as
Device-2: Realtek RTL8188EUS 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter type: USB driver: r8188eu bus ID: 1-1.3.2:6 chip ID: 0bda:8179
ifconfig sets the interface as wlx503eaad8b979.

[GreyGeek]

True, but I have a really small TP-link one I paid less than €10 for, it works just fine.

[EDIT] It's about as big as my thumb's nail, and plugs-and-plays on both 5.3(and earlier) and 5.4 kernels.
Inxi see it as
Device-2: Realtek RTL8188EUS 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter type: USB driver: r8188eu bus ID: 1-1.3.2:6 chip ID: 0bda:8179
ifconfig sets the interface as wlx503eaad8b979.

Name? Model# ? Got a link to a vendor?

[Don B. Cilly]

I looked at my Amazon buying history and what I bought is a TP-Link TL-WN725N. Currently €8.

Vendors in your area should be easy to find.

[claydoh]

Dongles shmongles. I betcha we can get wifi without resorting to this, once we get more info.

[GreyGeek]

Dongles shmongles. I betcha we can get wifi without resorting to this, once we get more info.

That's probably true, but here's an English parachute just in case:
https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-wirel...8881684&sr=8-3
The only problem is that it works for Linux kernels 4.4 and lower. Don, does your dongle work on 20.04? If it does then American buyers can use the link above.

[Don B. Cilly]

It does work on 20.04. Kernel 5.4.0-29. I tested it.
And it worked on 5.3 and earlier kernels. Never had a problem with it. Look. this is on my desktop - on 20.04, no other wireless adapters:



[EDIT] My desktop situation at the moment