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 -nnkwhich 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: rtl8723beAfter 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