I have KDE Neon installed on a USB device. It boots fine (flashed using Rufus from Windows 11). I don’t intend to install it on this computer. And I don’t have another device for a dedicated install right now. I was planning on using the USB as a dedicated KDE Neon environment.
However, the wifi doesn’t work. And this laptop has no ethernet connection.
The output from lspci is: intel meteor lake pch cnvi wifi rev 20 driver
I ran ubuntu-drivers devices, as instructed in the second post. But that exited without any output at all. As I don’t have an internet connection, adding the repository is not an option. Is there any link I could download a binary, or archive that can be installed, from?
And will it even persist between boots using the live USB? Rufus prompted me to select between iso (or was it img?) and dd, and I selected the former, described as that it allows modification of files on the drive.
No, using a live USB session, nothing is saved. You’d want to actuallyinstall the OS to a USB drive for that.
Can you tether a mobile device?
Also, neither of those links are going to be relevant here.
The ubuntu-drivers is for proprietary drivers, and I believe your Wi-Fi is open source.
And neon/Ubuntu is not the same as Debian. You should already have the iwlwifi firmware You should have any Intel wifi firmware installed by default, it willl be a different package name than in Debian - linux-firmware-intel-wireless.
I can connect my phone to this laptop via USB C. On Windows, I have access to adb. But what would that be for? Would it help to get a second USB drive to install from one onto the other?
If you can’t get wifi working in the live session, then this is an option for use.
The wifi card is fully supported, though there was a bug back in February with the firmware needing to be bumped for a new kernel at the time, but that has since been fixed.
It is possible that Secure Boot may be blocking things as well.
Adb is irrelevant here.
You’ll have a better time running an installed OS versus running the live usb installer session, as you are now. The Live session does not store or save anything, it is read-only. So, yes, if you have another USB drive available, you can use the live USB to perform an actual install to the second drive. A thumb drive will need to be a decent size to be useful, but 32Gb may do in a pinch if you are just experimenting. 64 is my personal minimum.
And be aware that most thumb drives are not great for running a full OS with heavy reads/writes, so it is not hard to wear one out if you use it a lot, in my experience.
Ideally, a SATA or nvme driver in a USB enclosure is the best bet, but not a requirement or anything.
I’d also suggest trying other distros to test how the WiFi works (or doesn’t ) there.
Secure boot is disabled on this laptop. It is not possible to even load a different image with it enabled. This version of KDE Neon was downloaded this week (15 September), and seems to still be the latest available: neon-user-desktop-20260903-0454
I am not interested in trying out other distributions. This question is specifically about KDE Neon. Nor am I interested in installing it anywhere, as I had already clarified in my previous reply.
The USB drive is fine, capacity nor speed are an issue. It uses a USB C port and has 250GB.
No ethernet connection available at all or the laptop has no ethernet port? If the second case, then there are LAN to USB adapters available.
It is not clear if you don’t see any wireless networks or just do net get internet connection by connecting to it? If you see the wifi networks, then for testing you can create an access point with your mobile phone and try to establish a wireless connection using that.
Then you probably need to use tethering for an internet connection, unless you can discover what is missing or needs to be done for your card. And then repeat this every time you boot it.
Trying out another distro’s live ISO is just a quick test checking working wifi in a distro with more current drivers/kernel, etc.