Wi-Fi & Wireless Firmware

Networking 2026-08-28

Wi-Fi works on first boot. NetworkManager is preinstalled and enabled, and the wireless firmware for common chip families ships inside the image — there is nothing to install after deployment.

All three interfaces work day-one:

GUI — the network quick settings/panel in your desktop
nmtui — terminal UI
nmcli — scriptable CLI (used throughout this page)

Firmware Coverage

The image includes the linux-firmware set covering these vendor families:

Family	Covers
AMD GPU	AMD graphics-adjacent platform firmware
Atheros	ath9k, ath10k, ath11k chips
Broadcom	brcmfmac-supported chips
Cirrus	Cirrus Logic audio/codecs
Intel	iwlwifi family (AX/BE series and older)
MediaTek	MT7921/MT7922 and similar
NVIDIA	NVIDIA platform firmware
Radeon	Legacy and current Radeon GPUs
Realtek	rtw88/rtw89 PCIe and USB adapters

…plus others pulled in by the same set. Regulatory database (wireless-regdb) ships with it.

To identify your chip and confirm its driver loaded:

lspci -nnk | grep -A3 'Network controller'

The Kernel driver in use: line matters — if present, the correct in-kernel driver bound successfully. For USB dongles:

lsusb

Connecting

# Scan and list available networks
nmcli device wifi list

# Connect to a WPA network
nmcli device wifi connect "SSID" password "password"

# List saved connections
nmcli con show

GUI paths:

GNOME: top-right menu → Wi-Fi → select network
KDE Plasma: network applet in the system tray
COSMIC: Settings → Network → Wi-Fi

Regulatory Domain

Check the currently applied regulatory domain:

iw reg get

A runtime change (until reboot):

sudo iw reg set DE

The persistent configuration method is region-dependent; most users never need to touch this — the shipped wireless-regdb defaults are correct for nearly all setups.

Power Save

Wi-Fi power saving trades latency for battery life. Check the current state:

iw dev wlan0 get power_save

Disable it for a specific connection (applies whenever that connection is active):

nmcli connection modify "MyNetwork" wifi.powersave 2   # 2 = enabled, 3 = disabled

If you see ping spikes or stuttering on real-time traffic (calls, games) on battery, disabling power save on that connection is the first thing to try. See Power Management for related laptop tuning.

Known Chip-Family Notes

Broadcom — many chips work out of the box via the in-kernel brcmfmac or b43 drivers. However, some older Broadcom chips require the proprietary broadcom-wl driver, which exists only in the AUR and therefore cannot be host-installed on Shanios' immutable root. If your chip requires it, file an image-inclusion request at github.com/shani8dev so a future image can carry it.

Realtek — some USB adapters prefer newer kernels with updated rtw88/rtw89 support; these arrive automatically via OS updates since the kernel ships per-slot with each deploy.

MediaTek / Intel / Qualcomm (QCA) — generally trouble-free with the shipped firmware.

rfkill

Radio kill switches (hardware keys, airplane mode) surface through rfkill, which is preinstalled:

# List radios and their soft/hard block state
rfkill list

# Unblock a soft-blocked radio
sudo rfkill unblock wifi

# Unblock everything
sudo rfkill unblock all

hard blocked: yes means a physical switch or BIOS setting is cutting the radio — no software can override that.

Diagnostics

# Firmware load errors and version mismatches
dmesg | grep firmware

# Everything NetworkManager did this boot
journalctl -u NetworkManager -b

# Overall NM state
nmcli general status