Just bought a Toshiba Satellite L75D-A7280. Immediately dropped Windows 8 for ArtistX. Apparently corrupted .iso, so I reinstalled with a new .iso (after they upgraded their build to 13.04, apparently) then just decided the whole thing was just too bloated so decided the smartest thing for someone that hasn't ever touched a terminal to do is go to the last LTS, 12.04. Throughout all of my ridiculous floundering there has been one constant since dropping Windows; no wireless support.
I am currently on the machine in question hooked directly to my router. No problems there. I've tried going on the Toshiba support website and downloading the drivers but there's no indication I'm not doing it wrong.
I've done some looking around online and learned to type lshw and, concerning the network, I get this:
*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Network controller
product: RTL8188EE Wireless Network Adapter
vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0
version: 01
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: ioport:2000(size=256) memory:f0100000-f0103fff
and also, and it may be an unrelated issue, I have a serial saying it's unclaimed as well. It's a Hynex Semi-Conductor, apparently. I don't know what that is.
I'm seeing a lot of posts about the RTL8188 but they seem to be in Greek (or Unix, very little difference to me) so if someone could ELI5 (or like I'm a 30 year old man that has only just now walked away from Windows, anyway) I would appreciate it greatly. Kinda dove in head first and landed immediately over my head I guess.