Tuesday, 30 April 2019

Networking / Wireless with Debian LXQt

There are some issues possible with LXQt if you have Wifi because of limitations in the current Buster install. Some of these may be resolved by the time Buster is released...but not all, for reasons explained below.

First issue for Wifi is if the drivers are non-free, as is fairly likely. You'll notice this at setup if you get asked for a driver file to allow the wireless networking connection to be accessed (more likely if using the network based installation). This occurs because Debian is configured by default to have non-free stuff in separate repositories and access to those has to be specifically enabled in the sources.list file. Basically you have to change the first set of repository statements in the file that point to main, to point to main contrib non-free. This is due to the Debian licensing model and philosophy.

After that you can, for example, install firmware-iwlwifi which is the package for Intel wireless. 

The next issue is that there is no network connection manager installed by default in LXQt with Buster. Installing network-manager-gnome is the way to get this, along with nm-applet. Then you have to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and change the following:

[ifupdown]
managed=false
 
change the false into true. This is necessary to ensure that you can manage the wired interface as by default you will not be able to manage this.

After that you should be able to get the wireless interface working on your computer. If you don't have wireless, having Network Manager installed is still useful if you need to set up anything non default with the wired networking such as a static IP address. 

UPDATE: I had a lot of trouble on this computer getting Network Manager to be able to set the IP address and parameters for the Ethernet cable port properly. The settings in the /etc/network/interfaces file read

iface enp3s0 inet dhcp

whereas in Network Manager I had changed to manual configuration which should have been shown in the file. So there is an ability to directly edit the parameters in that file so in our case we write something like

iface enp3s0 inet static
    address 192.168.1.222
    netmask 255.255.255.0

with no gateway or DNS servers or anything because this particular interface is only being used on the intranet and not to access the internet. But the question remains why Network Manager is not setting those parameters in the file. In other words it seems Network Manager was only able to configure the current session when it was used and not the configuration settings for next time. Network Manager was apparently able to handle the wireless connection. Possibly the issue of what is being managed in the Network Manager settings mentioned above.