Lenovo Yoga 13 Realtek wireless driver

I've recently purchased a Lenovo Yoga 13 and put Ubuntu 13.04 on it last night. I was unable to get wireless to come on and thought that I would mess around with it today. Today I have followed the detailed 'how-to' at: http://majordamo.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/getting-the-realtek-rtl8723ae-bt-wi-fi-card-to-work-on-a-lenovo-yoga-13-on-linux-mint-13-ubuntu-12-10/ The problem is I can not download and install the required headers as I do not have ANY internet connection on this device. Is there any way for me to get them on a flash drive and bring them to the Lenovo?

Any and all help is appreciated. Thanks

Solution 1:

Update: as of 14.10 utopic, there is a semi-working driver included by default, but it frequently disconnects and has difficulty reconnecting. The best solution is to continue to build the lwfinger driver as described below and then blacklist the driver included in Ubuntu.

That how-to link is outdated; the latest version of the rtl8723au wireless driver can be found at https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au.

In preparation we'll need some build tools and kernel headers:

sudo apt-get install git build-essential linux-headers-generic linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Here are the steps to install:

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au.git
cd rtl8723au/
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe 8723au

When you update the kernel, you'll need to run these steps again to get wireless working (except for the git clone). To fetch the latest version of the code, use git pull. Alternatively you can set up DKMS to do that for you as described in user20826's answer.

The bluetooth driver for that chip can then be found at https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au_bt. Perform the preparation as above and install like this:

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au_bt.git
cd rtl8723au_bt/
make
sudo make install

Solution 2:

The author merged in DKMS support a few months ago, but didn't integrate it into the make install process. Following these commands will add it to DKMS so you don't have to manually recompile after every kernel update.

From https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au/blob/master/README.dkms:

To get DKMS to work:

• Install dkms

  sudo apt-get install dkms
  

• Clone this source to the directory /usr/src/8723au-0.1/

  sudo git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au.git /usr/src/8723au-0.1
  

  or if you already had it cloned to [PATH]

  sudo cp -R [PATH] /usr/src/8723au-0.1
  

• Run (as root):

  dkms add -m 8723au -v 0.1
  

• Test a build:

  dkms build -m 8723au -v 0.1
  

From now on this driver should be available for any new kernels.

Solution 3:

Post #6 here, although it is for a different driver, describes the process to download and install linux-headers and build-essential on a flash drive, transfer them to the Yoga and install them. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2050126 It is cumbersome and tedious, but it can be done.