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I have a problem with getting WLAN to work on my laptop with Ubuntu 14.04. LTS. The WLAN connection was all fine till I somehow must have done something that broke it. I have Windows 7 installed on the same machine as well and WLAN connection works there without a problem. So it can't be a problem with the hardware not working.

I've surfed a lot through the Internet to find help, but nothing worked. I have another machine with Ubuntu as well where WLAN works fine. On that machine some option named "Wireless" is displayed in the System Settings > Network tab. However, this is not the case on my laptop where the WLAN connection got broken. On the machine with working WLAN I get this output when issuing "sudo lshw -C network":

*-network
  description: Wireless interface
  product: RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter
  vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
  physical id: 0
  bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
  logical name: wlan0
  version: 01
  serial: here MAC address is displayed correctly
  width: 64 bits
  clock: 33MHz
  capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
  configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rtl8192ce
  driverversion=3.8.0-25-generic firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.101 latency=0
  link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
  resources: irq:17 ioport:c000(size=256) memory:e7000000-e7003fff

On my laptop with broken WLAN connection this looks quite different:

*-network UNCLAINMED
description: Network controller
product: Wireless 7260
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0
width: 64bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:f7d00000-f7d01fff

This looks to me like the WLAN card is not propperly recognized. On both Ubuntu machines (the with working WLAN and the one with working WLAN) nothing is displayed in the tab Software & Updates under "Additional Drivers". So, it doesn't look like being a problem with missing additional drivers.

Does anybody have a clue what I could try?

Any hints greatly appreciated. Cheers, Oliver

EDIT

This is the output of lspci -knn | grep Net -A2; uname -a:

04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 [8086:08b1] (rev bb)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 [8086:4070]

05:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device [10ec:5287] (rev 01)
Linux oliver-tuxedo 4.4.0-59-generic #80~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 6 18:02:02 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

EDIT2

$ lspci -knn | grep iwlwifi /etc/modprobe.d/*

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:# /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf
/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:# iwlwifi will dyamically load either iwldvm or iwlmvm depending on the

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:# microcode file installed on the system.  When removing iwlwifi, first

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:# remove the iwl?vm module and then iwlwifi.

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:remove iwlwifi \

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:(/sbin/lsmod | grep -o -e ^iwlmvm -e ^iwldvm -e ^iwlwifi | xargs /sbin/rmmod) \
Pilot6
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OlliP
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2 Answers2

1

You need to upgrade the kernel to 4.4 to get this wireless adapter working.

Connect to the internet by wire and run

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-xenial linux-firmware

and reboot.

This will install the required kernel and upgrade the linux-firmware package that has firmware for the 7260 chip.

Pilot6
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1

All right, I found the solution on this page: https://www.linux-onlineshop.de/forum/index.php?page=Thread&postID=306

So I downloaded iwlwifi-7260-16.ucode and copied it to /lib/firmware. After the reboot WLAN was working.

With a bit more diligent searching through the Internet I could eventually have found this earlier. Thanks anyway to Pilot6 for his continuing effort.

Again, WLAN was working on that machine and I still don't understand why it stopped working. Maybe some update that didn't also update the WLAN driver ?!

OlliP
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