My computer’s Wi-Fi has basically stopped working. I say basically because if I take out the adapter and plug it back in again, the Wi-Fi works for about ten seconds and then stops working. The same thing happened a few weeks ago, so I reinstalled the driver, which worked, but apparently now it doesn’t want to. I feel like if I could update my system it would be better, but I can’t do that without Wi-Fi.
I tend to think of problems were hardware works initially and then stops shortly thereafter as being power-management problems. The first place I’d look (after the logs) would be at the power-management settings.
Edit: If you can easily reproduce the issue, try leaving sudo journalctl -f -t kernel running in a terminal and watch for an error to scroll by when the problem occurs.
Edit2: According to that page you linked, you should be using the kernel’s built-in driver if you are on 6.13+. Use uname -r to see what kernel you are currently running.
Since that web site says that there is a better driver available in the 6.13 kernel, I’d try to go the route of updating the kernel. Can you use a wired connection or maybe side load the new kernel?
The best I have is Bluetooth tethering from my phone, lol. I was considering just completely reinstalling Fedora so I did flash a fresh image to a USB earlier, but I haven’t done that yet.
I don’t know if reinstalling Fedora Linux would be easier or not. That’s up to you if you want to try that. If you want to download the rpms for the updated kernel on another system and use a USB drive to transfer them to your laptop, I think these links should be what you need (you might not need all of these, but I copied them all to be sure).
Before you install that new kernel on your laptop though, I’d remove the current WiFi driver. You should be able to do that with sudo dkms remove -m <driver-name> --all. Use sudo dkms status to view what is currently installed.
Once you’ve removed the old WiFi driver completely from your system, cd into the directory where you have the downloaded RPM packages and run sudo dnf update *.rpm. Then reboot and cross your fingers.
Edit: I just added --skip-broken to that command in case it tries to download additional (optional/weak) updates while updating the kernel. It probably isn’t necessary. (Scratch that. Apparently --skip-broken doesn’t work with dnf update.)
Alright, update: I reinstalled Fedora, updated the kernel, and it’s still not working. Honestly I’m just going to buy a new adapter. Thanks for the help everyone.
