Ubuntu Wi-Fi Troubleshooting Guide
September 5 2024 12:40am • Est. Read Time: 2 MINWi-Fi connection keeps dropping for no reason:
Use the Wi-Fi Power Save Utility to turn off Power Save. This can lead to greater wi-fi stability.
My Wi-Fi is slow or behaving oddly
Use the Wi-Fi Diagnostic tool to gather a report. This can be passed along to support or used yourself to spot areas where your wireless internet might be behaving oddly.
My Wi-Fi is STILL dropping or freezing
Use the Wi-Fi Drop Tester to see if we can spot when and why it's dropping. Drops usually happen during frequency switches on some networks or even during a sudden signal strength drop. This tool and the Wi-Fi Diagnostic tool can shed a tremendous amount of light on the subject.
Wi-Fi applet is not visible, Settings>Wi-Fi is also empty:
If you prefer to do most of the above manually and avoid the wi-fi fixer tool, options are provided below.
- Is something blocking Wi-Fi?
rfkill unblock all
Then check it:
rfkill
It should indicate both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are unblocked.
- Are your Wi-Fi driver modules loaded?
Intel
lsmod | grep iwlwifi
- If not, let's try loading them:
sudo rmmod iwlmvm && sudo modprobe iwlmvm
MediaTek
lsmod | grep mt7921e
- If not, let's try loading them:
sudo rmmod mt7921e && sudo modprobe mt7921e
- Still no applet for Network Manager? Connect to Ethernet using our Ethernet expansion card. Let's reinstall Network Manager and reboot.
sudo apt install --reinstall network-manager
- Is the Wi-Fi radio detected and turned on?
nmcli
- Nmcli is not showing anything? Let's check the radio:
nmcli radio
You should see:
WIFI-HW WIFI WWAN-HW WWAN
enabled enabled enabled enabled
If the radio can't be found, it's time to look into the config files:
ls /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
This will show you all the remembered connections you've made. Let's take a look at the one you're trying to connect to.
sudo cat /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/NameOfNetworkYouAreConnectingTo.nmconnection
This should displays something that looks a lot like:
[connection] id=NameOfYourNetworkYouAreConnectingTo uuid=(hidden for this article) type=wifi interface-name=wlp0s20f3 [wifi] mode=infrastructure ssid=NameOfNetworkYouAreConnectingTo [wifi-security] auth-alg=open key-mgmt=wpa-psk psk=YourSecretWiFiPassword [ipv4] method=auto [ipv6] addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy method=auto [proxy]
If yours looks different, then you would want to copy the output and reach out to support or the community for assistance. If it does look similar, it's probably correct and we can move on. If it looks wrong, reach out to support with the output from above.
Now assuming you've made changes to Wi-Fi power savings and you tried to do it on your own, let's make sure this didn't break something - this breaks the ability for the Network Manager indicator if malformed to appear.