I’ve been having connectivity problems with my Intel 7260 wifi card on my HP ZBook 17-G2 laptop with OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 for which I have found a solution. So, I decided to post the problem and solution here for the benefit of other folks who are having similar issues.
I had previously observed intermittent problems connecting to NetGear and LinkSys routers. However, the problems became most pronounced after I installed a Ruckus Access Point and my PC’s wifi connection began failing several times each day. I would lose the wifi connection and could not get it back by restarting NetworkManager or network services. Most of the time, I had to reboot to get my wifi connection back. I first worked around the problem by disabling 802.11N with “options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1” in /etc/modprobe.d. However, I found a permanent fix with the help of Emmanuel Grumbach at Intel after I posted the problem at linuxwifi@intel.com.
The fix was to install the Core14 release of the firmware and driver at:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/iwlwifi/core_release
Copy the firmware to /lib/firmware with:
“cp iwlwifi-7260-17.ucode /lib/firmware/”
Then, compile and install the driver as per these instructions:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/iwlwifi/core_release#how_to_install_the_driver
With this fix I’ve now been running for five days without a problem and I’m getting “N” speeds of 300+ mbps with my Ruckus AP.
The only problem is that I will need to reinstall the firmware and driver each time that I get a kernel update from the standard Leap 42.1 repos. Therefore, the OpenSUSE folks need to integrate this fix into Leap 42.1 so as to avoid this one drawback. In the mean time, I will manually reinstall the firmware and drivers after each kernel update. This isn’t a huge inconvenience given the infrequency of kernel updates and the ease of installing the Core14 release from Intel.
There is a similar bug report that has already been filed in bugzilla to which I have added my comments:
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=963920
FYI,
Gordon