Toshiba Satellite C850, Wlan, rtl8188ce not working

Question

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 onto a brand new Toshiba Satellite C850 64 bit laptop. Wlan does not work, Tries to connect, gives up after some time. $Windows7 works 100%.

There appears to be a problem with the driver. The actual hardware is a rtl8188ce chip. The firmware & driver loaded by Ubuntu is for the rtl8192ce chip.

How can I get and install a driver and firmware for Ubuntu 12.04 and rtl8188ce?

Answer 1

I'm posting this from my wireless connection, so I hope this will help you. If it crashes before I finish posting the solution or later today I'll let you know!

1. I went to this page and downloaded the correct drivers package, this one worked for my laptop: RTL8188C_8192C_USB_linux_v3.4.3_4369.20120622 (any one with Linux 3 support should work, I believe).

   I think the step I was missing before was "build essential" that is talked about here.

2. Open terminal and do

   sudo apt-get install build-essential
   

   The rest of the instructions follow from that page or the readme; I navigated to the driver subdirectory and ran

   sudo su
   make
   make install
   reboot
   

Hope it works for you too.

Please keep in mind that, in case you update the kernel (check the list in the update manager before hitting "install updates"), you will need to repeat the procedure described above, so it may be better if you don't delete the driver.