[sf-lug] Fw: getting wireless drivers to work with my new pc

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John F. Strazzarino (jstrazza at yahoo.com):

>  I looked in /lib/firmware and found the file iwlwife-3945-2.ucode

Do you perhaps mean 'iwlwifi-3945-2.ucode'?

(We see here the problem of retyping rather than collecting the
information verbatim.  To do the latter, the easiest way is to run the
'script' command to capture everything subsequently outputed to a subshell.
The 'exit' command or Ctrl-D closes the subshell, leaving behind ASCII
file 'typescript' as your verbatim record.)


> I am also able to see a wlan0 interface for the wireless card, but not
> able to connect.

Unfortunately, it's totally unclear to me what the verb 'see' means in
this context, so I don't know what to do with this statement.

Let's back up, shall we?  You have an Intel NUC5PPYH, using Intel's 
Braswell CPU core that was introduced 2015-16.  According to the specs
(https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/87740/intel-nuc-kit-nuc5ppyh.html),
this unit's supposed to have an integrated Intel Wireless-AC 3165
wireless component.  This indeed requires a relatively recent iwlwifi
driver plus a proprietary firmware BLOB that in Debian would be
furnished by the firmware-iwlwifi package from the non-free collection.

Doing 'dmesg | grep iwl' should be enlightening, in (e.g.) showing
whether the kernel's iwlwifi driver is able to successfully load
firmware or not.

On a quick read, it seemed like iwlwifi support for (specifically)
the Wireless-AC 3165 was problematic at kernel 4.1, the first kernel rev
to work with the firmware, and kernel 4.9 and above is better.

Anyway, I'm not at all sure the firmware filename yo cite is correct.
Look for the comments about Wireless 3165 on
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/iwlwifi , especially
in the 'Firmware' table.