Wireless help

Basically I cannot for the life of me get my Lenovo Yoga 700's Wifi working on Linux

I'm running a vanilla Debian install and I followed This and This but to no avail. Currently I have no idea what to do.

I would check to see if these modules were unloaded.

modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcmsmac bcma

then load the wl module
modprobe wl

Did that,
the operation didn't fail or output any errors
I uninstalled debian but I'll probably be using mint

if your laptop has a broadcom card in it, then you need to compile the drivers

Did your wifi work..

Dont use mint. There security practices currently are pretty questionable, not to mention the broekn update process they use on the distro.

That is the most helpful response
I will look into finding the source to compile

My wifi did not work. There was only 2 interfaces. A loopback and a USB connection that was my phone
Security wise I'll be fine, not only was that pretty much a one time thing, I also pride myself on security and always checking my hashes
They'll have to break SSL, OR find a collision and still compromise the downloads

Remember to dist-update for kernel updates.

@Dje4321 is probaly right, im not overly familiar with broadcom chips, i try to avoid them xD

I had no idea I had to do dist-update
Never had to do kernel stuff before.

Also I want mint because I dislike ubuntu but debian doesn't easily have access to macbuntu which is a nice themeset I really want because most cinnamon themes are pretty shit

Mint wont always update the kernel through normal updates. I dont know if this is common practice on other debian based distros but it leave a hole unless you notice and force the update.

I'm resisting the urge to get you to try Fedora xD

I usually go debian
Just plain vanilla debian
I might retry debian again.
Once this issue is fully resolved



This looks really indepth

I used debian a while ago, wrote a post about it.

Ultimately I moved as it was missing some software, not even the usual slow stable debian missing, but outright they haven't updated it in over a year (even on sid) missing.

I think ive come to the point where unless I have a very specific use case, I want a distro that will just work and provide reasonably up to date packages. Fedora does that for me.

Can you give us the output of

Also can you connect your laptop through a ethernet connection to get access to internet

Debian is very slow compared to fedora. Fedora is on Kernel 4.4.4 compared to 2.6.3.

I cannot since I removed debian from it and may choose another distribution

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almost every distribution you goto you will have this issue. if your wifi is broadcom then you will always have to compile and install the drivers. broadcom drivers are open source but distributions are not allowed to use them.


I would personally recommend fedora. bleeding edge, but if you want something more stable then go with a debian based distro like linux mint, ubuntu, debian, etc.

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For all that is unholy, and I'm sorry to say it, just spend like $20 and buy an Intel Wi-Fi card. Broadcom Wi-Fi cards are blasphemy on Linux. Broadcom Wi-Fi cards are broken in almost all popular Linux Distros (With the exception of some LTS distros) and some Rolling Release Distros. my laptop came with a Broadcom Wi-Fi card. only distro I could get working was Manjaro and Ubuntu 14.04 (at the time)

I can name about 5 or 6 distros off the top of my head where you're going to have an issue with a Broadcom chip.

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