I just installed PureOS on a 2018 Lenovo ideapad 320 that I purchased new in 2018. Installation went mostly without issue. However, from the live USB, it picked up all available wifi networks but whenever I tried connecting to my home network it would eventually give me an error saying it failed to connect.
I installed from the live USB by plugging in directly into my router with an ethernet cable, but after installing it still will not connect wirelessly.
Thoughts? Thank you.
From what I can see, that laptop is using Intel wifi card which requires non-free firmware to function, which is not included in PureOS. Short story: you won’t be able to use wifi on your laptop with PureOS. The behaviour you are experiencing is the exact what is expected to happen.
See: https://tracker.pureos.net/w/pureos/hardware_requirements/
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You need Lenovos’s wifi driver. You’ll need to do some research on whether they provide one or find the manufacturer of the wifi chip and see if they have it. Just remember pureos is about not using proprietary drivers and blobs. It will work with anything because it is Linux provided you can find the necessary drivers and such.
Thank you.
I’m not sure I understand fully, but I located the wifi driver from Lenovo support page, but it’s for Windows 10. What you’re saying is that I cannot download and use that, correct?
If so, I’d have to find a linux based driver on the Intel, realtek, Qualcomm page, right?
I’m obviously new and trying to learn. Thank you for your help.
Exactly! Sounds like you got it.
One thing you can do is search for your laptops model for what driver was used in Ubuntu by others. From here you should be able to find a repository that holds the driver, and you can try installing it.
If you get really frustrated you can also try using Ubuntu. As far as Linux goes it is the most compatible Linux distro for hardware. However, Ubuntu’s stance is very different from Purism. Ubuntu includes 3rd party and proprietary software from the start to make all this possible.
Sometimes it is unavoidable. IE: If you have a Librem 13 or 15 and want to use bluetooth, you have to use a proprietary driver. This is because there isn’t a FOSS based driver for it yet.
Ha! The who reason I’m trying PureOS is because I wanted to switch my Lenovo from Windows 10 (yuck) to Linux…in my case, Mint (64-bit, Cinnamon). But it fails to install properly from a live USB – no matter what I do (and I’ve tried just about everything I can think of…even the LM forum couldn’t solve it), it hangs up and spins endlessly when it comes to installing the grub2 package.
I even found a spare computer no one was using at work (old HP) that I could take home and LM installed like a champ. So I’m tempted to believe it’s a hardware issue. This Lenovo has been nothing but problems since I got it (especially with Windows 10) and I thought by going to a Linux-based OS I could salvage it and get some use out of it since it has decent specs (4GB ram, 1TB hd, decent chip).
Anyway, it’s going to be an “adventure” to see if I can find a linux driver for the wifi card, and a whole other adventure to learn how to install it.
I may just put the laptop up on craigslist for cheap…this whole endeavor has become a massive time sink.