Linux check wifi adapter

Wireless connection troubleshooter

Even though the wireless adapter is connected to the computer, it may not have been recognized as a network device by the computer. In this step, you will check whether the device was recognized properly.

1. Open a Terminal window, type lshw -C network and press Enter . If this gives an error message, you may need to install the lshw program on your computer.
2. Look through the information that appeared and find the Wireless interface section. If your wireless adapter was detected properly, you should see something similar (but not identical) to this:

*-network description: Wireless interface product: PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation

PCI (internal) wireless adapter

Internal PCI adapters are the most common, and are found in most laptops made within the past few years. To check if your PCI wireless adapter was recognized:

1. Open a Terminal, type lspci and press Enter .
2. Look through the list of devices that is shown and find any that are marked Network controller or Ethernet controller . Several devices may be marked in this way; the one corresponding to your wireless adapter might include words like wireless , WLAN , wifi or 802.11 . Here is an example of what the entry might look like:

Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection

USB wireless adapter

Wireless adapters that plug into a USB port on your computer are less common. They can plug directly into a USB port, or may be connected by a USB cable. 3G/mobile broadband adapters look quite similar to wireless (Wi-Fi) adapters, so if you think you have a USB wireless adapter, double-check that it is not actually a 3G adapter. To check if your USB wireless adapter was recognized:

1. Open a Terminal, type lsusb and press Enter .
2. Look through the list of devices that is shown and find any that seem to refer to a wireless or network device. The one corresponding to your wireless adapter might include words like wireless , WLAN , wifi or 802.11 . Here is an example of what the entry might look like:

Bus 005 Device 009: ID 12d1:140b Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. EC1260 Wireless Data Modem HSD USB Card

Checking for a PCMCIA device

PCMCIA wireless adapters are typically rectangular cards which slot into the side of your laptop. They are more commonly found in older computers. To check if your PCMCIA adapter was recognized:

1. Start your computer without the wireless adapter plugged in.
2. Open a Terminal and type the following, then press Enter :

Wireless adapter was not recognized

If your wireless adapter was not recognized, it might not be working properly or the correct drivers may not be installed for it. How you check to see if there are any drivers you can install will depend on which Linux distribution you are using (like Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora or openSUSE).

To get specific help, look at the support options on your distribution’s website. These might include mailing lists and web chats where you can ask about your wireless adapter, for example.

More Information

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The material in this document is available under a free license, see Legal for details.
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Top 3 Commands to check Wifi Information on Ubuntu / Linux – iwconfig, iwlist, nmcli

Getting detailed information about the wifi adapter on a linux system is not straight forward using gui tools.

However there are simple commands that can do the trick.

In this article we shall take a look at commands like iwconfig, iwlist, iw and nmcli which can be used to probe details about the wifi adapter and connection.

1. iwconfig

The iwconfig command is quite similar to the old ifconfig command, but works for wireless connections. Simply running the command without any arguments would show the details of the current wifi connections on the system.

Whether its your system wifi on a laptop or a usb wifi adapter, this command will list them all.

The following is the output on a desktop machine using a usb wifi adapter.

The details include the transfer bit rate, frequency, access point mac address and some other details.

$ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. enp1s0 no wireless extensions. wlxc025e9177832 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"BsnlDeck" Nickname:"[email protected]>" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 80:26:89:C3:6A:CA Bit Rate:150 Mb/s Sensitivity:0/0 Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=68/100 Signal level=52/100 Noise level=0/100 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Note down the interface name. here it is wlxc025e9177832

The ESSID field tells us the name of the wifi network (here its BsnlDeck) to which the adapter is connected.

Now you can configure the wireless radio transmission power using the iwconfig command like shown below:

$ iwconfig wlxc025e9177832 txpower 30

Here is the output from my Acer Swift 3 laptop showing wifi connection details:

$ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. wlp0s20f3 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"AirtelFiber_5GHz" Mode:Managed Frequency:5.745 GHz Access Point: 98:35:ED:D4:E1:4C Bit Rate=390 Mb/s Tx-Power=19 dBm Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on Link Quality=52/70 Signal level=-58 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:10 Missed beacon:0 $

2. iwlist

The next command is iwlist. It lists various supported parameter values by the wifi adapter. For example supported bit rates and supported transmission powers.

Check supported bitrates — This will show the data transfer bitrates supported by the wifi adapter.

$ iwlist wlxc025e9177832 bitrate wlxc025e9177832 4 available bit-rates : 1 Mb/s 2 Mb/s 5.5 Mb/s 11 Mb/s Current Bit Rate:150 Mb/s

3. nmcli

Check status of all network devices — nmcli device status or nmcli dev

$ nmcli device status DEVICE TYPE STATE CONNECTION wlxc025e9177832 wifi connected BsnlDeck enp1s0 ethernet disconnected -- lo loopback unmanaged --

Check details of available wifi networks that can be joined.

$ nmcli dev wifi IN-USE BSSID SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY 98:35:ED:D4:E1:48 AirtelFiber Infra 5 130 Mbit/s 75 ▂▄▆_ WPA1 WPA2 * 98:35:ED:D4:E1:4C AirtelFiber_5GHz Infra 149 270 Mbit/s 63 ▂▄▆_ WPA1 WPA2 60:63:4C:84:15:AA dlink-15A3 Infra 4 270 Mbit/s 47 ▂▄__ WPA1 WPA2 0C:80:63:76:5F:90 Krishna Infra 9 405 Mbit/s 40 ▂▄__ WPA2 14:CC:20:A5:70:48 Camp Nou Infra 9 54 Mbit/s 35 ▂▄__ WPA2 84:D8:1B:00:7A:7C subash Infra 10 270 Mbit/s 35 ▂▄__ WPA2 AC:84:C6:F4:60:18 TP-Link_6018 Infra 11 270 Mbit/s 34 ▂▄__ WPA2 18:A6:F7:3C:F8:1C Risha Infra 6 135 Mbit/s 27 ▂___ WPA2 34:0A:33:68:5C:E6 neymarjr Infra 13 270 Mbit/s 15 ▂___ WPA2 $

Other examples

1. Check transmission power of wifi adapter

Use the iwlist command to check the transmission power of the wifi adapter. It will display the power in decibels-milliwatts and milliwatts as well.

$ sudo iwlist wlp0s20f3 txpower

$ sudo iwlist wlp0s20f3 txpower wlp0s20f3 unknown transmit-power information. Current Tx-Power=21 dBm (125 mW) $

$ iwlist wlx74da38e88bd7 txpower wlx74da38e88bd7 unknown transmit-power information. Current Tx-Power=20 dBm (100 mW)

2. Change transmission power of wifi adapter

Now use the iwconfig command to change the radio transmission power

$ sudo iwconfig wlx74da38e88bd7 txpower 10 [email protected]:~$ iwlist wlx74da38e88bd7 txpower wlx74da38e88bd7 unknown transmit-power information. Current Tx-Power=10 dBm (10 mW) $

$ sudo iwconfig wlx74da38e88bd7 txpower 3 $ iwlist wlx74da38e88bd7 txpower wlx74da38e88bd7 unknown transmit-power information. Current Tx-Power=3 dBm (1 mW)

The above command works for a variety of wifi chipsets including onboard intel wifi chipsets in laptops as well as chipsets in usb wifi adapters.

3. Get details of usb wifi adapter

The lsusb command will show all usb devices including the wifi adapter

$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 045e:00cb Microsoft Corp. Basic Optical Mouse v2.0 Bus 001 Device 003: ID 22b8:2e82 Motorola PCS Bus 001 Device 002: ID 413c:2107 Dell Computer Corp. Bus 001 Device 006: ID 7392:7811 Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS] Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

In the above output the line «Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS]» is the usb wifi adapter.

4. Check the loaded driver modules

To check what drivers are currently loaded to operate the wifi driver, use the lsmod command and grep for wifi.

$ lsmod | grep -i wifi rtlwifi 77824 3 rtl8192c_common,rtl_usb,rtl8192cu mac80211 778240 4 rtl_usb,rtl8192cu,rtlwifi,rtl8xxxu cfg80211 622592 2 rtlwifi,mac80211

5. Get lots of detail about wifi adapter

The iw list command shows a huge amount of hardware information about the wifi adapter.

Links and Resources

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How to find out which Wi-Fi driver is installed?

In other words, the /sys hierarchy for the device ( /sys/class/net/$interface/device ) contains a symbolic link to the /sys hierarchy for the driver. There you’ll also find a symbolic link to the /sys hierarchy for the module, if applicable. This applies to most devices, not just wireless interfaces.

Maybe there’s a better way, but I’ve used lshw -class network (as root) and it gives me this output:

 *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 82566MM Gigabit Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 19 bus info: pci@0000:00:19.0 logical name: eth0 version: 03 serial: 00:a0:d1:a3:87:c8 size: 1GB/s capacity: 1GB/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e1000e driverversion=1.0.2-k2 duplex=full firmware=0.3-0 ip=192.168.2.206 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=1GB/s resources: irq:29 memory:fc300000-fc31ffff memory:fc325000-fc325fff ioport:1840(size=32) *-network description: Wireless interface product: PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:06:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 61 serial: 00:1d:e0:69:28:07 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlagn ip=192.168.0.104 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn resources: irq:31 memory:c8000000-c8001fff *-network DISABLED description: Ethernet interface physical id: 3 logical name: vboxnet0 serial: 0a:00:27:00:00:00 capabilities: ethernet physical configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes 

You can grep for driver from that output. In my case I use lsmod | grep iwlagn , giving me:

iwlagn 63559 0 iwlcore 67702 1 iwlagn mac80211 123574 2 iwlagn,iwlcore cfg80211 87657 3 iwlagn,iwlcore,mac80211 

Don’t ask me what each of those mean 🙂

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