Ubuntu – HP ProBook 855 G2 wireless problem in 12.04

drivershprealtekwireless

After installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in my laptop HP ProBook 855 G2, I found that my wireless network wasn't working. I noticed many people had the same problem, all of them having the same card RealTek RTL8723be (it shows as b723 with lspci). I already tried the following suggestion:

  1. Pull the repository at https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new
    from a working computer and copy it to a USB stick.

  2. In the computer to be fixed, load stick and cd to folder. Then run:

    make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe rtl8723be

  3. At this point, the wireless network will be enabled, but it won't
    find any APs to connect with. I have tried tweaking the driver
    options as suggested in many places:

    echo "options rtl8723 ips=0 fwlps=0" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf

But this didn't work. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Best Answer

After searching further, the solution for my laptop in particular was to put the option msi=1 in the rtl8723be.conf file. Just to summarize the whole steps:

  1. Pull the repository at https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new from a working computer and copy it to a USB stick.

  2. In the computer to be fixed, load stick and cd to folder. Then run:

    make 
sudo make install 
sudo modprobe rtl8723be

  3. At this point, the wireless network will be enabled, but it won't find any APs to connect with. Adding msi=1 to rtl8723be.conf fixed this problem:

    echo "options rtl8723 msi=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf

I guess different laptop models need different driver parameters, even though the wireless card is the same.

Note: the driver may break after some software upgrades, in which case just repeat step 2.

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