After installing Ubuntu 17 in my new laptop I started having some quite strange issues with the wifi connection. The network manager wasn't able to detect any wireless network.

If I booted in Windows I realized that everything was fine, so I confirmed that this was caused by some problems with the Linux driver

I could check what driver my computer is using:

colo@colo:~$ lspci  -nnk

which gave me this:

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter [10ec:b723]

	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter [103c:81c1]

	Kernel driver in use: rtl8723be

After intense and difficult investigations(I searched in Internet :) ) I found some clues:

The rtl8723 drivers can have two antennas but HP just installs one . The rtl8723 drivers needs to have two antennas assigned. Someone has fixed this and coded a new version of this driver: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new

I can not confirm that this is the reason for this issue because I am not an expert in wireless drivers but it sounds reasonable and installing the new driver worked for me.

Here are the steps I followed to remove the current driver and install the new one.

wget https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new/archive/master.zip







cd rtlwifi_new







make clean







sudo make install







sudo modprobe -r rtl8723be







sudo modprobe -v rtl8723be isp=0 ant_sel=2







sudo -i







echo "options rtl8723be isp=0 ant_sel=2"  >>>>  /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf







exit







sudo reboot

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