Enabling the intel 7260 WiFi chip on my Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E540
 

Hi all,

I just bought a second hand Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E540 and installed a fresh copy of Debian 8 (w/ Gnome UI). The ethernet interface works out of the box, but wifi doesn't.

I read the instructions on https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi, but am stuck there.

I have the wireless-tools package installed.

At this point I am confused what to do. The page lists many PCI devices, USB devices and PCMCIA devices, but I have a built in WiFi chip which (accoording to lspci -v) is an Intel Wireless-N 7260 :


The "access denied" at the end doesn't really sound good, so my guess is that I'm missing the appropriate firmware. Also "iwconfig" doesn't list any wireless interfaces; just lo and eth1.

I found matching firmware on the intel website (https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/ww...000005511.html) but I have no clue what to do with the tgz file. The intel website says to extract it to /lib/firmware, but that directory does not exist in my debian 8 installation.

At this point I'm not able to find anything on Google that can help me further, so any pointers in the right direction are more than welcome.

Best regards,
Marvelade

You need to unpack the firmware file with tar.
tar -xzfv <firmware file>.

Then create /lib/firmware.

Move or copy the unpacked files to /lib/firmware/.

Thanks for your swift reply, Keruskerfuerst. A very strange thing happened. When I tried to create the firmware directory, I got the message that it was already there. When I looked inside, there were a lot of files already in there. The creation date of the directory was today, so I did something that must have created that directory and its contents. That's not the only thing, because out of the blue my wifi was suddenly available as wlan0...

I'm happy it works, yet at the same time I would like to be able to understand what happened.


Best regards,
Marvelade