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I recently started learning Linux and I'm booting into Debian from USB. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong but I cannot get my wifi up. Regular wired works perfectly.

iwconfig shows no wlan0. No messages about iwlwifi firmware in dmesg. lsmod shows iwlwifi loaded and used by cfg80211. I can modprobe iwlwifi off and on.

Below are some screen shots with some info. Sorry for the ugly picture. I was really trying to figure this out myself but not sure if its going to happen.

Results from:

uname -r; lsmod | grep iwl; dmesg | grep firm; lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net

enter image description here

Updated to include 'lsh -C network'

enter image description here

Progress update:

Updating the kernel to 4.9 caused me to boot to black screen presumably because of a conflict with display drivers. I've attempted apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-intel but the system responds by telling me it is not installed and so not removed. 'locate xorg' shows 3 files located in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules and one in /usr/share/doc/keyboard-configuration. lshw -c video reveals 2 devices, both with configurations set to "latency=0" which I presume means they are not using separate drivers.

Jeff Schaller
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Mike
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  • What type of wireless device do you have? (Run `sudo lshw -C network`) – Ariyan Jun 15 '17 at 18:46
  • I've updated original post to include this output. – Mike Jun 15 '17 at 20:14
  • Do note that Debian in particular has a tendency to be somewhat finicky in this regard. Not only because of their [free software guidelines (DFSG)](https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines), but also because it is an extremely conservative distribution and even the most recent release, fully updated, is commonly quite a long ways behind the underlying projects. (Critical fixes do get backported, but not new functionality or in this case hardware support.) While it can be a great learning experience, if you are new to Linux you might be better served by chosing some other distribution. – user Jun 15 '17 at 21:06

1 Answers1

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Your wifi card is Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165

According to Intel the official website the the wifi card should work on the kernel version 4.2 and higher.

Device                                               Kernels        Firmware    

Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 
(starting from firmware XX.XX.13.0 and kernel 4.1)      4.2     iwlwifi-7265-ucode-25.30.14.0.tgz

On debian jessie you need to install a new kernel from backports:

Edit your sources.list

apt edit-sources

Add the following line:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free

Save your file then update

apt update

Search for available linux-image:

apt-cache search linux-image

Then install the new linux-image, e,g:

apt-get -t jessie-backports install linux-image-4.9.0-0.bpo.3-amd64

If you last command show a missing dependencies, install with:

apt-get -t jessie-backports package-name-here

Reboot your system

Now you can install the Intel driver as follow:

wget https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/_media/en/users/drivers/iwlwifi-7265-ucode-25.30.14.0.tgz
tar xvf iwlwifi-7265-ucode-25.30.14.0.tgz
cd iwlwifi-7265-ucode-25.30.14.0
cp iwlwifi* /lib/firmware
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi

Or install firmware-iwlwifi from backports then reload the driver.

GAD3R
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    Yes; a quick Google search for `debian 8086:4010` seems to suggest that a somewhat more modern kernel is needed. It's amazing at times what searching for the PCI ID can uncover. – user Jun 15 '17 at 21:01
  • I like this above answer, it seems like it should work but it causes me to boot into a black screen. I wiped my device and tried it again with several different kernel versions but each one causes me to boot into a black screen. Maybe I should just try switching to Ubuntu though I hate to give up on Debian. I checked the logs in '/var/log/apt' but didnt see anything about missing packages. – Mike Jun 16 '17 at 13:58
  • @Mike solving the black screen using the Stephen kitt answer https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307210/how-smooth-is-upgrading-linux-kernel-in-debian-8-5 – GAD3R Jun 16 '17 at 14:05
  • Updated above with progress here. – Mike Jun 16 '17 at 18:47
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    Got it working! Thanks everyone. Black screen was solved by adding 'nomodeset' in the boot screen @ GRUB, then making the fix permanent by editing '/etc/default/grub'. I'm sure there is some better way to do this but it works. Wifi was still down so i just installed firmware-iwlwifi and sure enough wlan0 showed up. The rest was just a matter of configuring /etc/network/interfaces to connect. – Mike Jun 21 '17 at 03:08