HP rtl8723be Wireless Wifi

Finally i got a new laptop, and it's HP with Radeon graphics and Realtek wireless card. Fortunately, the Realtek wireless, the Realtek RTL8723DE 802.11b/g/n PCIe Adapter to be exact, is not so friendly with linux in general.

Debian won't recognized it. Its friendly derivatives SolydXK won't recognized it too. Ubuntu and Linux Mint is not recognizing it either. To make it worse, i don't have any cable connection. So the wifi is my only option to connect the laptop.

And this is an exhausting journey, as i am not a linux geek. 

After i got myself a connected computer, I found this thread :

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=204172

(wow, 2015 thread and the problem still occurs now in 2019)

Download the firmware from here :

https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new/archive/master.zip

Copied the zip file into the laptop via FDD, then extract it, and follow the step from the thread or github:

$make

$sudo make install

$sudo modprobe -r rtl8723be

$sudo modprobe rtl8723be

...and finally its working with a very weak signals!

but its working :)

on to the next step:

DEVICE=$(iw dev | grep Interface | cut -d " " -f2)
sudo iw dev $DEVICE scan | egrep "SSID|signal|\(on"

BSS xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

     signal: -65 dBm

     SSID: Error404

The above commands get a result range from -59 dBm to -65 dbm, and neither solution from the github or thread change that number. But the connection is just stable and not dropping if the laptop position is near enough from the wifi router.

Well, thats my work around for now. Cheers.


Update :

updating the kernel to the newest one make the Realtek --RTL8723DE 802.11b/g/n PCIe Adapter-- not being detected -again- by the system.

Reinstalling the firmware using the step above solve the problem.