Lenovo Linux choices (and drivers)

Afternoon everyone.

SO currently i have a Lenovo ideapad 330S-15AST with a Amd A9 cpu, R5 graphics and 4gb of ram. I’m going through a few different flavour’s of linux on a partition on the sdd (only about 20gb)

I have come here to ask for assistance on a couple of things i’m hoping someone more knowledgeable than me could help.

with the laptop it does not have a eithernet port so at the moment to get any internet on any of the linux distros i have to teather it via bluetooth on my phone due to a driver not being in the kernel

i have a rtl8821ce and found a driver on github (https://github.com/tomaspinho/rtl8821ce) but as it lays, i’ve been following the instructions to install it, it seems to compile and install but i still get no wifi.

I’m wondering if there is something i can try to get the driver into it and working?

other thing i’m looking at doing is updating the kernel also while i am there. How would i go about that?

Thank you for any help

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In a terminal what is the output of

iwconfig

Just states…

lo no wireless extensions.

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Lenovo Yoga laptops

Some new Yoga laptops (like the Yoga 530) come with rtl8821ce as the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip. But the ideapad-laptop module, which may come included in your distribution, may conflict with this driver. To disable:

sudo modprobe -r ideapad_laptop

Did you follow this advice from the Github page?

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I will say sorry as i have missed that part at the bottom (feeling daft posting this)

I’ll boot up in a few minutes and give that a go

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It alright. I dont read stuff all the way either. I just skim and hope I got the info I need. :slight_smile:

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Yeah thats exactly what ive done.

Right what I’ve done is as follows…

Sudo apt update

Sudo apt install - y git dkms

Git clone (git location)

Cd rtl8821ce

Sudo modprobe - r ideapad_laptop (puts it in airplane mode)

Sudo. /dkms-install.sh (says it installs)

I then try and do sudo modprobe 8821ce and this gives me modprobe: error: ould not insert 8821ce: operation not permitted. And it does not seem to have any way of starting up the wifi so im a bit stuck there.

Iwconfig is showing no wireless connections on lo and bnep0

Might be a secureboot thing

https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?320115-modprobe-operation-not

You sir are a total legend. I just rebooted into bios, disabled secure boot, ran the cd and modprobe again and now I’m up and running.

Thank you very muchly, youve made me a happy guy

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Do you have the kernel headers installed for your currently loaded kernel. If you are building against mismatched headers, it will not load. This is like the nVidia DKMS issue each time a new kernel is released.

I will give you the easy answer and tell you to not bother with realtek if you can help it. 15 bucks can get you an intel chipset that won’t throw issues or bitch about drivers. I highly recommend using an equivalent or better chip from anyone else.

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Sorry to bother you… but… I was a distro hopper, went trhough some flavours of gnu/linux and right now I can tell you: there’s not a lot of difference between them.

You have different desktop environments, different package manager and that’s pretty much it… Don’t get too caught up in the distro hopping if the one you’re currently using “works” cause you might end up losing an entire day switching through distros and gettin’ no work done…

Basically the flavours are different, but not like “chocolate” and “strawberry”, they’re pretty much different kinds of “chocolate” and some come with sprinkles, others with cinnamon…

If you are on Debian, you can try to edit ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ and add ‘contrib non-free’ to the end of the repository address lines. Run ‘apt update’. Realtek drivers are in a package called ‘realtek-firmware’ if I remember correctly. Would also think that Lenovo specific packages are in the non-free’ repo.

Fair point.

I don’t think people see this much because they are used to Ubuntu kind of assuming you want access to everything.

By default, Debian tries to not taint your install with proprietary and not free stuff. Unless you adhere to that philosophy, do what @hem and add the main contrib non-free tags to your apt sources list.

Also, if you end up building the driver using dkms, write down the commands or make a script. Every time you update your kernel, you’ll have to rebuild it. It’s most likely possible to automate this somehow, I just made a script to deal with it, solved the problem.

Agreed, except that Lenovo have the annoying habit of stuffing wifi whitelists in their BIOS. If the OP can find an approved FRU for an alternative wifi card, IMHO, it’d be worth the trouble of re[lacing the card with something that actually supports Linux out of the box.
I threw a couple of Broadcom cards in the garbage a few years back, because of this kind of silliness. Life is too short!

Thanks for the replies peoples.

I was planning on putting a extra 4gb of ram and a ssd / hdd into the laptop and i may do as suggested and get a intel wifi card.

I’ve installed ubuntu 18.04 lts onto the thing, like suggested theres not much difference in distros for what im using it for so I’m just going ti the one i am used to / comfortable with.

As for the headers, I’m not 100% sure if I’ve updated them but i have updated the kernel from 5.0 to 5.2.11, not sure if they’ve been done as part of that but I’ll look at it when i get back on the device.

And again thanks for the advice on the driver, literally the first time I’ve had to download and compile one, feeling lucky in that sense