I picked up a Dell XPS 13 9333 and installed PureOS but the wifi didn’t work. I found this debian article and being new I just installed Elementary OS to get it working out-of-the-box.
I want to try out PureOS again. How easy is it to install the evil drivers to get PureOS working on my computer?
It shouldn’t be that hard. PureOS is Debian based. Debian should have those drivers and you should be able to install those drivers in PureOS. I’d be willing to help you if you can give me more information. As well as show you how to fix similar driver issues, in a terminal type:
sudo lshw
sudo = superuser do
ls = list
hw = hardware
Find your WiFi card and let me know what it is.
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I’m not sure if lshw is included within elementary OS or needs to be installed first? And according to XPS 13 9333 support page it is about Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, therefore result might show:
description: Wireless interface
product: Wireless 7260
vendor: Intel Corporation
@mstdnuser please proceed as you offered to help.
For what it’s worth, it looks like the desired Debian package is iwlwifi.
https://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi
I don’t know if Elementary has the same package, but while on Elementary, you could create a Debian virtual machine, use Debian to download the package to a USB stick, and then install it on PureOS from the USB.
If you have a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, you could install it directly from PureOS by enabling the Debian non-free repo.
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At the moment @mstdnuser and I just suppose that @dean wants to confirm which non-free firmware he needs on his XPS laptop with # dmesg | grep -i firmware or by reading the # lshw output, but you are direct and absolutely right: none needs to understand (worthless) why this Dell laptop needs firmware-iwlwifi, initramfs-tools and probably firmware-misc-nonfree as well (workable even without “enabling the Debian non-free repo”).
Thanks everyone
Elementary has lshw. It’s cool to see everything in the computer and all its capabilities.
product: Wireless 7260
vendor: Intel Corporation
logical name: wlp2s0
version: 6b
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=4.15.0-70-generic firmware=17.948900127.0 ip=192.168.1.26 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.1
I have a thunderbolt to RJ45 adaptor but I’ll like to learn how to install via USB. I found an article about installing, but I don’t want others to rely on links to solve this problem.
In /lib/firmware there is a lot of iwlwifi-***.ucode files. Would I just cp the ‘correct’ file to USB and then on pureOS, place the file in the same directory and use sudo modprobe iwlwifi to install?
Because its a kernel module, would copying it from any amd64 Linux Distro be fine? What about the module’s dependencies?
In a terminal type:
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security jessie/updates main non-free
This will add the repository with the drivers for you and make it effortless to manage dependencies. Of course the next step is to install it. Type:
sudo apt install iwlwifi
Once you have done that you want to avoid the rest of the proprietary packages, In order to do so you need to go into your repositories list. Idk where this is located because I use a different free software distro called parabola. However the best guess I have is in /etc/apt/sources.list. So go into a terminal type:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Use that command to remove the repository we added earlier.
Your homework is to use the man (manual) command and learn about the command deb & nano.
The way to become a user who can self solve problems is to type out the commands listed and not to copy paste them, although pasting links is fine. Hope this helps let me know if this worked.
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Thanks for putting me on the correct path.
I checked which version of Debian PureOS uses, Buster.
cat /etc/debian_version
It took a while to find the correct file, but I found it at
https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-iwlwifi
When you go to download a file from packages.debian.org, check it has what you need inside.
dpkg-deb -x *.deb /tmp/deb-extracted/
To install the correct downloaded deb file.
sudo dpkg -i firmware-iwlwifi_20190114-2_all.deb
To activate the wifi adapter, restart your PC or run
sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi && sudo modprobe iwlwifi
The wifi icon does not appear in the system tray (I’m running off the live disk, so cannot restart), but it can be used in the settings panel.
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