MX Linux on Asus E410MA BV037T - Great experience

[pilpintu]

I was not able to find a hardware compatibility data base here. I'll appreciate it if someone can move this post to the right place, if necessary.

As the subject line says, I'm enjoying my installation of MX Linux 19.3 on a low-end Asus E410MA, a poor relative in the Vivobook series The limited features of this laptop include:

Intel Celeron N4020 dual core, 1,1 GHZ processor (can you believe they still produce 1.1 GHz processors???)
4Gb ram
64Gb emmc

Quite sad, isn't it? lol

There's no way to upgrade any of this. You can only add an mvme memory card.

The thing is, MX Linux flies on it. Everything works wonderfully, EXCEPT...

The wifi/bluetooth won't be detected out of the box. I also tried LinuxMint and it didn't work either, which makes me think that most other distros probably won't, either.

BUT, this has a very easy solution!!

1. Make sure secure boot is disabled
2. Connect a usb wifi adapter for temporary internet access
3. Run sudo apt-get install rtl8821ce-dkms (this will install the driver for the RTL8821CE chipset)
4. Restart

and that's all!

More info here: https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... .html#ID10

[junoluna]

I have the same chipset.... It doesn't work out of the box on any distro

However the good people at mx have now added ihe driver to the official mx repos

[JayM]

I have that wifi chipset too. I even wrote a [url=https://mxlinux.org/wiki/hardware/realt ... -detected/]wiki[ page/url] about how to obtain and install the wifi driver for it.

An alternative to a USB wifi adapter to get temporary Internet access so you can install the wifi driver from the MX stable repo is, if your computer has an Ethernet RJ-45 jack, temporarily connect it to your router with an Ethernet cable. Or as the wiki says "sneakernet" it to your computer from another one that has Internet access using a USB stick, SD card or CD.

I'm connected via wifi to my cell phone as a portable hotspot right now in fact, as yesterday morning some workers who were replacing the streetlight on the pole near my house managed to break my fiber connection and I'm still waiting for my ISP's technician to come and fix it. Wifi works great, though I normally prefer to use Ethernet instead as it's full-duplex so throughput's a bit faster.

[agnivo007]

^^ Does downloading the deb file from somewhere and transferring using a usb stick work for that driver or it has other dependencies? Then, it's another way out...

There is nothing like wired internet, however I think 4G is full duplex...dunno if you're mentioning wifi.

[tony37]

just for info: kernel support for rtl8821ce should be in 5.12
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=259945 (last reply)