Wireless device not working during install

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1

I am trying to switch to NixOS from Fedora 38. I have a HP laptop with a Realtek network card. The required driver is rtw89. While it seems NixOS (stable) has this (from running find / | grep rtw89), nothing appears when trying to connect to the internet. (The only connection that appears after running ip address is lo (loopback)).

I tried using the unstable branch, but (unlike when I used Fedora 38 while it was in beta) it did not fix the problem.

2

I can’t help with the Wi-Fi, but i have found unstable more practical with less issues overall than stable. That said, i have had a number of issues as 23.05 became stable which i haven’t had the chance to resolve yet - mainly due to vacation with very little Internet access

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3

Thank you, but the unstable branch did not fix it, but if I can get it working, I’ll use the unstable branch.

4

Do you have
boot.kernelModules = [ "rtw89" ];
in your configuration?

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5

Yes. I start the NixOS live environment, start Konsole, and run:

sudo su
nixos-generate-configuration
nixos-rebuild edit

Then, a small nix config file shows (one line of actual configuration!) I insert the boot.kernelModules = [ "rtw89" ] line into the configuration, and run nixos-rebuild switch. Following that, I get slammed with many many network errors (But nothing that prevents the configuration from being built I think.) I log out, log back in, and nothing changed. Still can’t install or use the internet on the NixOS live environment. I think it might have something to do with not being able to have data persist through restarts in live enviornments, but I can’t change that.

6

Ah, this is a boot option, so it will likely not work with the live environment.
You can try sudo modprobe as you would do on any other Linux system.

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7

modprobe does not seem to search in the nix directory. It tries to look in /run/booted-system/kernel-modules/lib/6.1.33/.

8

I’m not sure whether the live system includes this kernel module.
Try find /nix/store -name "*rtw89*.ko" to locate it and use sudo insmod with the path you found.

9

It includes the rtw89_a, ae, c, and ce drivers. However I need the b and be ones. I think I’ll come back next release… Thank you!

10

If you have some means to circumvent the rtw89 for installation (ethernet, USB-Wifi) it might be possible to get the rtw89 working afterwards.

NixOS is using this driver:

It is packaged here:

and it probably needs an update which hopefully also fixes the issues with 5.15 LTS:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/177844

Once the update is in, you can check the Live-System based on unstable.

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