Recently I changed jobs and as ever one of the first things I did was wipe my new laptop and install Linux Mint.
I really like Linux Mint for it’s ease of setup but this time I hit an issue where my wireless connection was unreliable.
I did all of the usual things:
- checked with the IT team for issues
- made do with a LAN cable
- refused to believe it was my OS…
In the end I decided to check online for anyone else having issues with wifi/drivers on Linux Mint.
Sure enough a few other people had the issue on Ubuntu and most of the steps worked for me so I thought I’d rehash what I had done here for other Linux Mint users.
What we are basically going to do is fetch the latest drivers and install them.
Open up a terminal session and let’s firstly confirm the adapter version you are using:
sudo lshw -C network | grep -i product
On my HP Probook 450 G2 the adapter showed as:
product: RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
With that information in hand we can start the process by installing packages needed to fetch the source code for the drivers (git) and build and install the driver (install and build-essential):
sudo apt-get install build-essential git
Get the source code:
git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new/
Build and install the new driver:
cd rtlwifi_new
make
sudo make install
Reboot your laptop and the new driver will be installed.
I’ve been using this for about 3 weeks now and since updating the driver I haven’t had any WiFi dropouts.