Wireless on ThinkPad Edge E420s

Question

I have installed Kubuntu 11.04 (Natty) on my ThinkPad Edge E420 laptop.

Unfortunately, the wireless is not working. I have got Windows 7 installed besides Kubuntu, and wireless is working with no problems there, so it has to be problem of the OS.

What I tried:
I installed the official driver from Realtek RLT8192CE. After reboot the wireless didn't work, but at least the system was able to detect that it is present in the system.

However, after executing lscpi -v, under the card's details there was a line "Currently used driver" which said "r8169". Why is this?

I did all of this according to a manual on http://www.php-architect.com/blog/2010/05/01/getting-wireless-to-work-on-lenovo-thinkpad-t400-with-ubuntu-10-4-lucid/. There a meany other similar ones, but don't work for me either.

My questions are:

1) Is there any way to get this fixed? If yes, how to do so?

2) Do you think OpenSUSE (or any other distro) is better distribution concerning such hardware issues, so should I give it a try? If yes, which distro gives me the best chance?

Answer 1

You can try this

In the default Ubuntu 11.04 install without any extra drivers downloaded from realtek website,

a) Modify /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and put an entry near the end blacklist acer_wmi

b) Reboot and press Fn+F1 to go into the bios. Then look for Wireless settings and disable Wimax and Wireless WAN. Then save and continue booting.

It should work. However, if you've downloaded drivers from realtek site and compiled them yourselves then by using this method you'd not be able to boot properly. System hang or kernel panic related errors (thus there may be a need to go into recovery mode and undo the changes)

Answer 2

I made it working using driver rtl8192ce_linux_2.6.0005.1116.2010 from Realteks website.