I am not getting my wireless network adapter (wlan0) to show in the output of ifconfig
, but the card adapter name is showing in the output of sudo lshw -c network
. I have seen other posts which indicate that a common cause of this is that the card is hard blocked, which is visible through the use of the tool rfkill.
I feel like there logically should be a way to unblock the hardware without having to first install rfkill, as the hardware became blocked without the package being installed in the first place.
I understand that using rfkill is the most straightforward solution, but I am looking for the alternative more complex / lower-level approach to removing the hard-block on my wireless adapter.
Note: Please correct me if this is not possible without rfkill.
Edit: I have since purchased a different PCI wireless adapter, thinking it may work "out-of-the-box", but it is also not appearing on an ifconfig. My output of sudo lshw -c network
is now as follows:
*-network:0
description: Network controller
product: BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless Lan Controller
vendor Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 8
bus info: pci@0000:03:08.0
version: 02
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master
configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=32
resources: irq:16 memory:fddfc000-fddfdfff
*-network: 1 UNCLAIMED
description: Ethernet controller
product: 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless
vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
physical id: 9
bus info: pci@0000:03:09.0
version: 03
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=32
resources: memory:ffdde0000-fddeffff memory:fddd0000-fdddffff
#0 is the adapter I originally was trying to get working when I opened this post, and #1 is the "new" one.
I noticed the following interesting message when booting up, and searched for it using dmesg | grep firmware
:
... b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
... b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
... b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
... b43 ssb0:0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
... b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website.
So, it would appear that I need this firmware to get the b43 working... but why exactly do I need this? No tell-tale messages regarding the other adapter either...
lshw -c network
showNetwork Unclaimed
orNetwork Disabled
? Please post the output oflshw -c network
in an edit of your question