Realtek RTL8188EE, Toshiba Satellite C55-A5300, Ubuntu 12.04: No Wifi Connection

If ease of use is prime concern and 'easy' means fully automatic here, I'd second sudodus's last advice -

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otherwise go for 13.10 and hope it will be easy to upgrade to 14.04, which will be an LTS release.

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The solution in the thread he linked to is basically offers the same thing that 13.10 will offer you - the driver from kernel 3.12.. You can install the latest kernel in 12.04 too, which will be offered the upgrade to 14.04 (or just its kernel and Xorg packages only, as and if required) anyway. So you can choose whichever seems to be the best working solution for you -

1) Install the latest supported kernel on 12.04.3, which will install the same driver which you would have otherwise compiled from the backports package. This will be a permanent fix with no need to compile anything or do anything manually later. But whether the overall system would perform better after this upgrade can be questionable.

2) Install 13.10 and upgrade it to 14.04 when it comes out. I'd personally recommend to do the upgrade about a month later to give 14.04 enough time to iron out its bugs. Be aware that an 'upgrade' is not always smooth and sometimes breaks features/functionality/entire installation, especially if you are using any proprietary drivers and software from ppa's.

3) The above concerns bring up a third option that can be considered - Install 13.10 now, keep data in separate partitions (creating a separate /home partition makes that smooth and safe), and do a fresh install of 14.04 when it comes out.

Of course there are also some other options in-between, but none as easy and smooth as above ones.

Oh, and don't forget to test 13.10 in live mode first to make sure it works well with the hardware.

Thank you for your input Varun!

I've thought more about it though, and there are some other factors for me to consider here. This laptop is going to be for a friend of mine in India. He lives in an area where most people get on-line via USB dongles. And when I get to India, I'll be getting him a dongle. So given that, the likelihood he'll need the wireless feature is low. And the benefit of LTS till 2017 is great. Because he is not someone who is going to start downloading new versions and things like that. If I give him 13.10, it will likely remain on the computer for quite some time, perhaps years. Wiith 13.10 he'll lose support in July, won't be able to download any software or anything. So overall, even without wireless I think he will be better off with LTS. So I think I shall keep 12.04 on the laptop for him.

In the meantime if anyone does come up with a straightforward way of getting the wireless to work on this machine, that would be wonderful. Then he'll have both LTS benefits, as well as the wireless for any times he may need it.

Makes sense.

I believe the next best option, better than banging head with a dodgy card/driver, is to simply replace the card with a one that is properly supported. Now 'which one' is properly supported, can take a little research unless some of our friends can confirm a particular name. For the research, this may be a good starting point : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...CardsSupported

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Originally Posted by varunendra

Makes sense.

I believe the next best option, better than banging head with a dodgy card/driver, is to simply replace the card with a one that is properly supported. Now 'which one' is properly supported, can take a little research unless some of our friends can confirm a particular name. For the research, this may be a good starting point : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...CardsSupported

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+1

That all makes sense, yes. Thanks so much to you both. Now I've got a clear pathway to move on! :p

Even though there was no straight road available for getting the native wireless card working with 12.04, I'm going to go ahead and mark this thread as solved. If anyone does come up with a simple solution for that, I'd love to hear about it!