Getting Wi-Fi working during/after installation

I want to install Tumbleweed on my laptop (Panasonic Toughbook CF-31), but I think the wifi needs non-free drivers to work. The problem is, the net install and the offline image both seem to not include non-free wifi drivers, so I’m not able to connect to the internet in order to access the non-OSS repository to hopefully get the drivers to make it work. I could possibly connect the laptop with an ethernet cable during installation, but I also want to install openSUSE on my desktop which also uses wifi and would probably have the same problem, and it wouldn’t be fun to move it to a location that can access ethernet just for installation. I thought maybe the live iso would solve the problem, but apparently it’s not intended for installation and also doesn’t have a lot of drivers either. I previously had Debian on the laptop and I know I needed to use their unofficial version with non-free firmware to get wifi working.
My question is basically this: How do I get non-free wifi drivers on a computer (or the installation medium) to use during the installation?

If this

is your laptop, then your wireless card is an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and that should work without any non-free drivers. However i do not know whether the (optional) LTE device needs non-free drivers.

Regards

susejunky

That’s the spec sheet for the newest version of the CF-31. My laptop likely has an older version of that series of Wi-Fi hardware. I just know that I’ve always had to use the non-free firmware version of Debian on it and distros that only include free software, like Trisquel or standard Debian, wouldn’t recognize the wifi hardware, similar to what openSUSE is doing.
Maybe using USB tethering with my phone would work initially to connect to the internet…

Install openSUSE and post:

/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net

So we can see, which hardware is inside.

You can get the wifi after Installation working.

Using USB tethering from my phone works flawlessly to give my computer a temporary internet connection.
Plugging in that command gives this:

:~> /sbin/lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10ea] (rev 06)        Subsystem: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. Device [10f7:8338]        Kernel driver in use: e1000e        Kernel modules: e1000e--0a:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6200 [8086:422c] (rev 35)        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6200 2x2 AGN [8086:1301]        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi        Kernel modules: iwlwifi

The computer still doesn’t connect to internet without the USB tethering, but I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t know how to use wicked.

Are you getting stuck with the configuration (via YaST)? If so, review the following guide

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-opensuse-reference/cha-network.html#sec-network-yast

Alternatively, you may wish to switch to NetworkManager (done via YaST)…

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-opensuse-reference/cha-network.html#sec-network-nm

Let us know if anything is not clear. Please try and be precise about what you have tried and where you are getting stuck. Most likely, others who can help will want definitive output from commands that they will provide and request that you run.

Also please post:

zypper se -si firmware

And as root:

journalctl -b | grep -Ei 'firm|iwlwifi|wlan'

Please use Code-Tags for every command:
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/536143-Using-Code-Tags-Around-Your-Paste

I was able to use NetworkManager to connect to the internet. So the problem was I just needed to figure out how to set NetworkManager to open on boot, because I wasn’t using YaST before.
Thanks for the help.

I could’ve sworn I clicked the "Wrap

" button before, but I guess not.

Glad to read of your success with configuring via NetworkManager. Thanks for the update.