How do I install NetworkManager-wifi on Debian?

Question

I've been fighting my laptop for a few hours now trying to get the wifi to work. I have the drivers installed and iwlist scan manages to find the access points in the area, however NetworkManager isn't finding it.

Running nmcli shows wifi (iwlwifi), [REDACTED MAC ADDRESS], plugin missing, hw and running rpm -q NetworkManager-wifi says package NetworkManager-wifi is not installed.

Looking about online I found this https://pkgs.org/download/NetworkManager-wifi which lists the package for a number of distros to get the package for but not Debian.

What do?

EDIT

uname -a outputs

Linux TheLastMetroid 4.9.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.82-1+deb9u3 (2018-03-02) x86_64 GNU/Linux

lspci -knn | grep Net -A2 outputs

03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 3165 [8086:3165] (rev 81) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless AC 3165 [8086:4010] Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi

Solution

1. You shouldn't be using rpm on Debian (the correct way to check would be apt-cache show network-manager
2. If Network Manager isn't installed, you can install it using sudo apt-get install network-manager
3. Network Manager is almost certainly installed since nmcli seems to be available (which is installed by the network-manager package)
4. You almost certainly want to install network-manager-gnome instead, since that will give you a nice graphical interface.
5. In Debian, the wifi plugin is provided by the main network-manager package as opposed to being in a separate package.
6. The easiest way to install stuff in Debian is through deb files (through apt-get or aptitude), since that is what the repositories run off of. If you want to use rpms by default, you should not be using Debian (check out Fedora or similar, which use rpms by default and use a package manager such as yaourt or yum or whatever).

Hope that helps!

Comments

[A.B]

mentioning the use of rpm on a Debian system... this doesn't make much sense. You should read documentation on the basic usage of Debian. Starting there: debian.org/doc

[GAD3R]

Please edit here by adding the output of uname -a and lspci -knn | grep Net -A2

[tupto]

I've edited my post with these additional outputs

[GAD3R]

What is the output of rfkill list? rfkill can be installed through apt install rfkill.

[tupto]

With the help of @Chiraang I got it working. In the end we scrapped NetworkManager in favour or wicd which just worked straight away after install.

[tupto]

I already have both of these

[tupto]

Using rpm was a mistake on my part - still kinda new to this Linux biz. I do already have network-manager and network-manager-gnome (though I couldn't work out how to launch the gnome GUI). Still though it says plugin missing and I can't work out what that might be...

[Chiraag]

You might want to uninstall the rpm and re-install the deb package using apt-get. I suspect the rpm overwrote some of the binaries or configuration files.

[tupto]

I got rid of rpm but I'm not sure what you mean by reinstalling the deb package. If you mean NetworkManager I didn't use rpm to install that (or anything for that matter)

[Chiraag]

Oh, okay...Can you check that /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/NetworkManager/libnm-device-plugin‌​-wifi.so exists?

[tupto]

Running cat /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/NetworkManager/libnm-device-plugin‌​-wifi.so spat out a lot of stuff so yeah, it's there

[Chiraag]

Hmmm, okay. Just try sudo apt-get install --reinstall network-manager - given that the plugin is there, there shouldn't be any issues. It could possibly be a permissions issue or something else, which might be remedied by reinstalling NetworkManager.

[Chiraag]

Let us continue this discussion in chat.