I see the same -network UNCLAIMED entry in the output of lshw command. In KInfoCenter I see only lo device in the “Network Interfaces” section. It’s almost as if the WiFi controller just disappeared from the laptop.
I don’t know how to check if I have older kernel images on my machine. When I turn it on, it just directly boots to Plasma without showing me the grub menu. I can hit the laptop-specific key to go to the BIOS but that’s not very useful here.
Since WiFi was working for the last few weeks I assume this is an consequence of installing the latest update. How can I figure out what is going on and fix this?
Thanks, nmcli returned only one device: lo.
I don’t have the grub commands you mention. I’m using KDE Neon. I will see if I can find a USB to Ethernet adapter somewhere to get connectivity. Otherwise, this laptop is dead in water.
you might want to boot to the prior kernel or roll your system back to an earlier snapshot, as the kernel update just released seems to not work well with neon.
To get a hidden Grub menu to appear, you can hit f4 during or just past the BIOS splash. Or the Esc key, though this is often used to access the BIOS. Holding down also can do this.
Thank you @claydoh! For me (a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13), it was the F4 key. Also, I had to hold the Fn key down when hitting the F4 key because of FnLock.
I was able to boot using kernel version 6.14.0-37 and the WiFi now works fine. The question now is how I can investigate what the issue was and, if possible, how I can rectify it. If that is not possible, how can I revert to using the older kernel by default so that I don’t have to remember to do the Fn-dance every time I turn on the laptop?
You can edit your /etc/default/grub to set a specific entry as the defualt.
What you need to do is find information about your wifi card, like brand and chiop model, as well as hardware IDs. lspci or lsusb can help there.
Are you using any special addon drivers for it?
This will not be specific to neon here. Ubuntu upgrades the kernel in LTS every 6 months for part of its lifespan. We just got 25.10’s kernel. So other *buntu LTS users with similar hardware will be seeing the same issues.
Those using third party drivers, or dkms driver packages from the archive can have the module fail to build with a new kernel. The code may not support this new kernel, or possibly this module is not needed in the new kernel if it has native support now. In any case, there would be errors, and the kernel would not even install, I’d think.
More likley it is just a bug affecting some users with certain specific chips.
Thanks again for the pointers. I was myself digging about to get some more info. dmesg was useful. I saw an error message related to missing drivers for iwlwifi which led me to this page: How to fix iwlwifi firmware error "no suitable firmware found!" in Linux in Thinkpad E480 Fedora 37 · GitHub with instructions on how to rectify it.
I was able to clone the repo, and copy the relevant files to /lib/firmware to get my WiFi back.