Wifi card not detected, no Ethernet access

Support Installation
#1

:uk:/:us:

My YunoHost server

Hardware: Old 32 bit computer
YunoHost version: 4.x
I have access to my server : direct access via keyboard / screen
Are you in a special context or did you perform some particular tweaking on your YunoHost instance ? : yes : the computer has no Ethernet card, but only a WiFi module.

Description of my issue

I have installed the last available ISO image yesterday. I used the graphical mode. It could detect my wifi card, it asked me for wifi authentication and it could download packages from the internet. So far so good.

When the process was complete, I had to reboot on the freshly installed Yunohost. The wifi is no more active. My guess is that the Debian graphical installation assistant is able to handle it properly … but does not install it.

I had a look on Debian forums about how to activate wifi access. I was quicky stopped because most answers start with apt get which is not possible when you have no network. I have also tried with a USB Ethernet adapted but its not detected.

If you have any suggestion please help me.

#2

Eeeeh yeah that’s a bit of egg-and-chicken problem, you need internet to download the internet driver in order to have internet …

Yup, would guess the same, that’s a bit annoying …

I don’t think there’s any “easy” fix considering you seem to mention there’s no ethernet at all ?

There is however some more “technical” / super-boring approach consisting to downloading the appropriate packages on another machine (ideally with a similar distribution - in that case Debian, but probably Ubuntu or Linux Mint would work too ?). For example with something like

apt-get download <the_relevant_package>

which should put the corresponding .deb either in the current folder, or maybe in /var/cache/apt

Then you can transfer this .deb using an usb key to the server… Then install it using dpkg -i <the_.deb_file>

So far so good, but usually this may complain that some dependencies are missing and you have to repeat the process for all the additional packages it complains about …

(Possibly you can get an idea of the required packages by running apt show <the_package> | grep Depends

#3

I have configured /etc/network/interfaces with

allow-hotplug wlp3s0
iface wlp3s0 inet dhcp
    wpa-ssid MY-SSID
    wpa-psk  MY-PASS-KEY

I’m able to use ifup wlp3s0 . It says something like

DHCPDISCOVER on wlp3s0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 internal 8
DHCPDISCOVER on wlp3s0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 internal 13
DHCPDISCOVER on wlp3s0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 internal 15
DHCPDISCOVER on wlp3s0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 internal 14
DHCPDISCOVER on wlp3s0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 internal 11
No DHCPOFFERS received.

Note: The ìw package is not installed by default
I guess a step (or more) is still missing. Do you have an advice ?

Another option would be to install a plain Debian and then install Yunohost packages …

#4

Idk, can you first elaborate about what we were discussing previously … you did transfer the drivers / .deb from another machine and now supposedly the card should be recognized ?

#5

The command ifup works. At least it does not complain about the card. So I would say the card is recognized, but I guess I have missed something in the configuration.

About your suggestion I need to have access to another Debian machine. I have a Raspberry but it’s Raspbian running on ARM. I have an Ubuntu machine ; this one is a 64 bit machine (the one I’m trying to setup is a 32 machine. I can try but I’m not sure it will the same packages.

The thing is I don’t even know what I’m supposed to install. I’m not a Linux expert. I just have read several answers on Debian’s forums. I’m afraid I will spend a long time trying each of them with potentially no results

Since there is nothing on the machine yet, it might me easier and faster to install a plain Debian and then Yunohost.

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