[SOLVED] No wifi with Intel network controller a370

[arkaik]

Hi,

I just received my new computer which was delivered with Ubuntu as operating system. The computer is a Dell laptop Dell G5 15 - 5587.
At this point the wifi was working well as I used it to download the debian netinstall image.

After installing Debian Stretch on my computer (using ethernet for convinience) I have no wifi interface available.

At this point I checked that the hardware was discovered.

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# lspci | grep -i network
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device a370 (rev 10)

However, even with the pci wireless card beeing detected, I have no wireless interface to be configured.

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# iwconfig
enp60s0   no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.

I installed the package firmware-iwlwifi from debian repository but even after a reboot and checking that the module is loaded I still have no wifi.

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# lsmod | grep wifi
iwlwifi               229376  0
cfg80211              782336  3 iwlwifi,ipw2200,libipw

At this moment I supposed that the driver/firmware dependencies were not integrated into the kernel I was using (4.9.0-18). So I upgraded to the latest kernel available into stretch backports (4.18.0-0).

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# uname -r
4.18.0-0.bpo.1-amd64

However even after upgrading the kernel to the latest version, I still have no wifi interface available.

So right now I don't think that Ubuntu was distributed a kernel version greater than 4.18.x (I didn't checked), so I think that I may be a configuration issue.

The next try could be to rebuild the kernel from sources trying to find an option matching my wireless controller but I would like to have some opinions before rebuilding the kernel.

Do you think that the problem could come from kernel options ? ==> Could rebuilding the kernel solve the issue ?

Am I missing something with configuration ?

[4D696B65]

Did you remember to get firmware-iwlwifi from back ports too?

[arkaik]

Daaaamn, I feel kinda stupid

Thanks a lot that was the problem...

[stevepusser]

Your 3D graphics aren't working correctly with the Intel GPU also. You can confirm this by installing inxi and running

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inxi -G

which will show that you're running gallium software 3D rendering instead of Mesa hardware DRI. You have to install Mesa from backports in order to fix that.

You also need to install firmware-misc-nonfree from backports for full hardware support. You also want to install intel-microcode to fix Spectre CPU vunerabilities--check by installing and running spectre-meltdown-checker from backports.

Getting Bumblebee GPU switching to work will be another adventure in backports once you've got those working.

[arkaik]

I realized that my graphic configuration wasn't good when tried to plug my external monitor through HDMI.

As you said I'm running gallium instead of mesa

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$ inxi -G
Graphics:  Card-1: Intel Device 3e9b
           Card-2: NVIDIA Device 1c8c
           Display Server: X.Org 1.19.2 drivers: fbdev (unloaded: modesetting,vesa)
           Resolution: 1920x1080@60.02hz
           GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.9, 256 bits) GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 13.0.6

However reinstalling mesa from backports using :

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# apt install -t stretch-backports --reinstall mesa-utils

didn't solve the issue

I also installed packages from backports

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apt install -t stretch-backports firmware-misc-nonfree intel-microcode spectre-meltdown-checker

However after a reboot, the external monitor is still not detected by debian

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$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
eDP-1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1920x1080     60.02*+  59.93    48.02  
   1680x1050     59.95    59.88  
   1600x1024     60.17  
   1400x1050     59.98  
   1280x1024     60.02  
   1440x900      59.89  
   1280x960      60.00  
   1360x768      59.80    59.96  
   1152x864      60.00  
   1024x768      60.04    60.00  
   960x720       60.00  
   928x696       60.05  
   896x672       60.01  
   960x600       60.00  
   960x540       59.99  
   800x600       60.00    60.32    56.25  
   840x525       60.01    59.88  
   800x512       60.17  
   700x525       59.98  
   640x512       60.02  
   720x450       59.89  
   640x480       60.00    59.94  
   680x384       59.80    59.96  
   576x432       60.06  
   512x384       60.00  
   400x300       60.32    56.34  
   320x240       60.05  
DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

I'm not experienced with linux graphic stack at all :/ Don't you think I should open a new thread about this ?

[stevepusser]

Yes, a new thread is good.

This is a quite common problem with new computer hardware as Debian Stable ages.

Mesa is made up of quite a few packages; the ones you want to upgrade from backports are libgl1-mesa-glx and libgl1-mesa-dri. Hopefully, those should pull in the rest from backports. A complication is if you're planning to run Steam or Windows games in Wine, which are 32-bit on a 64-bit system. Then you'll have to remember you need the matching ":i386" (32-bit) versions of those updated libraries from backports after you enable 32-bit multiarch on your system. The same goes for the proprietary Nvidia drivers from backports, which you would also need to get from there if you decide to try and get Bumblebee GPU switching working for gaming, etc. You'll need some matching Nvidia i386 libraries from backports.