Diagnosing Issue With Wifi

Ask Fedora
1

Hi all,

I’ve got an old laptop that isn’t seeing my wifi for some reason. I’ll see if I can spell out all the details for you and maybe someone can give me some suggestions of what to do.

1.) It’s Fedora 36. Yes, I know that’s really old and part of the reason I’m trying to get the Wifi going is so I can get it up to date. Of course no wifi connection is a plus in that no one can hack it since it’s not on the internet at all. :slight_smile:

2.) It’s not a hardware issue. The machine is old enough that it dual boots to Win 7 and Win 7 is connecting to the local wifi just fine. Hence I’m convinced that whatever the issue is, it’s not hardware.

3.) I specifically tried nmcli radio wifi on and it said something about it being enabled. But when I run nmcli device wifi list it comes up empty.

I tried the stuff listed here: Networking/CLI - Fedora Project Wiki but it really seems like it can’t see the wifi hardware–hence point #2 above. Any suggestions on how to diagnose this so I can move to a lot more recent version of Fedora would be greatly appreciated!

I’m sorry I can’t give anything more specific but I’m stumped as to what to even try.

2

lspci | grep Wireless in the terminal will spit out any wireless devices. If it really can’t see any wireless hardware, you’ll get no response.

3

Thank you for the suggestion Brian!

4

Just in the rare case you’ve used a VPN, some of them have kill switched/lockdown modes. With following command you can check if there are any hardware blocks:

rfkill list

5

Thanks!