EEEPC 1000 and RT2790 WLAN problems

**fierce** · September 29th, 2021

Hi all

I have a very old EEE PC 1000 and I am trying to get life out of it by installing Debian onto it. I have not tried Ubuntu yet but I'm at my wits end with this thing, and if using Ubuntu means I'll get support then I'll happily try it!

I am a novice user though, and unsure what is wrong with the wireless card.

Originally, when I installed Debian, I could not get the wireless device to to even turn on at all, there is an indicator light on the front of the netbook. FN+F2 to physically turn the WLAN switch on the device would only make the light turn on for a second, then immediately turn back off. 'lspci' would show no wlan related results, at all.

'rfkill list' would show that eeepc-wlan was Soft Blocked but not Hard Blocked. 'rfkill unblock all' would do the same thing as FN+F2 - just trigger the light on for a second, then immediately shut off.

I came across this old thread while trying to research the problem: https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/ind...t-1587107.html

which lead me to add these lines to my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Code:

blacklist rt2xxpci
blacklist rt2800pci

and add these lines to /etc/modules

Code:

rt2860sta
rt2860

And now, upon reboot, I finally have the wireless light staying on! And lspci displaying the wireless card. And 'rfkill list' displays SOFT BLOCKED & HARD BLOCKED both as NO.

http://ix.io/3Als is my dmesg output
http://ix.io/3Alu is my lspci output

But now I am fully stuck, and unsure how to proceed.

None of the wireless utilities I've tried show any wireless devices. 'ip link show' only displays lo and enp4s0 which is my ethernet.

Any next steps, help, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks very kindly

**fierce** · September 29th, 2021

also, is there any way to tag a user to alert him to a thread? there is a particular poster I've seen on many previous helpful UbuntuForums thread named "chili555" and I feel like he's the guy to help me

**ajgreeny** · September 29th, 2021

Show us the output of terminal command

Code:

inxi -n

which will show us information about your network hardware and may give us more clues.

Please use Code-Tags for terminal output as it makes that output much more easily read and understood, formatting the text as seen in terminal, not as plain text when it is copied and pasted. See my signature below for a How-to

**fierce** · September 29th, 2021

Absolutely! I had to apt-get install inxi as it did not exist on my system:

Code:

Network:   Device-1: Ralink RT2790 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R PCIe driver: N/A 
           Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit or Fast Ethernet driver: ATL1E 
           IF: enp4s0 state: down mac: 00:22:15:8e:a2:78 
           IF-ID-1: usb0 state: unknown speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: 2e:ed:dd:f4:b3:10

**mikewhatever** · September 30th, 2021

AFAIK, Debian does not include proprietary wireless firmware, almost all wireless cards need. For whatever reason, they call it "some obscure wireless cards". Pretty sure their wiki has more info.

**guiverc** · September 30th, 2021

I can't really help (I hate wireless; only using it when I need to - but given I largely use desktop machines that's not common).

I will say I used an

Code:

asus eepc 1000HE (intel atom n270, 1gb, intel mobile 945gse integrated), wireless RT2790

in QA-testing Lubuntu, Xubuntu & other flavors of Ubuntu up to and including into the disco or 19.04 cycle (it was i386 only; or 32-bit, so my using it ended when i386 ISOs disappeared).

It was last used probably Aug-2020 in QA-testing 18.04.5 though I don't recall how extensively (a last RC test can be found here but you'll note it wasn't an extensive test; as prior testing would have shown issues & that test was quick before I switched to installs which are the issue close to release; there maybe others for other flavors too if you look).

I used that device in QA-testing Debian too (non-free ISOs in most cases; some boxes I know have issues when default Debian ISOs are used, so I test some regular QA-test boxes using those official ISOs before quickly shifting to the non-free ISOs that work on all devices when testing Debian/Ubuntu). FYI: Ubuntu using free only have the same issues as Debian; the difference is non-free is default for Ubuntu; but on a different ISO for Debian.

I didn't need to do anything on my eeepc on any release (Debian 7-11) that I recall. Mine has Debian installed on it, but I don't see release details in your question (sorry if I missed them).

**arochester** · October 5th, 2021

You need to install the package firmware-ralink.

https://wiki.debian.org/rt2800pci
Note! Its no longer Debian 8 "Jessie" or deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free - the latest stable issue is Debian 11 "Bullseye"

https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi

**jeremy31** · October 5th, 2021

I would undo the changes to the blacklist and /etc/modules and reboot, then see the wireless script link in my signature and post results. The firmware is part of Ubuntu linux-firmware package