I have three raspberry pi running OSMC.Two of them are on Wi-Fi and one of them is a direct line connection. After the most recent update neither of the Wi-Fi connections are working. One of them has a mouse so I can play with it but the other one I always used via an app on my iPhone or I used a terminal program to connect using SSH. But without Wi-Fi I really can’t do much with any of them. Cannot transfer files over the network.
Are you using the built in WiFi adapter?
I have removed support for some external Realtek WiFi adapters as they were preventing us from updating to 4.19 and moving forward.
Sam
I have the same problem here. Using a Raspberry 2B+ and a wifi dongle (no wifi board here). My wifi dongle is this one:
Running great since 2016. It can still be bought in shops and I don’t think it is realtek ship (but I may be wrong).
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Posting a log would allow someone to determine what chipset that dongle is actually using.
I’m using this one on one of the machines. I forget what the other one has.
Without Wi-Fi capability it’s going to be difficult to find the log file.One of them has a mouse but no keyboard. The other one has neither mouse nor keyboard. I can’t SSH into them. We’ll have to move them to a different room and put in a hard line to diagnose it.
I got sick of rebasing Realtek patches for new kernels constantly, and so a few drivers have been dropped and won’t be re-added until they are upstreamed. You can either stay on the older version or purchase a WiFi adapter.
Since Raspberry Pi and Vero has 802.11ac built in WiFi in recent models, the numbers haven’t been there to justify the hours of work to maintain these chipset drivers out of tree.
Other distributions are doing the same, and also plan to drop out of tree Realtek driver support in the near future.
Sam
This includes the official osmc WiFi dongle? No wireless connection,not even showing on my osmc networking tab as an option since latest update.
No - the official dongle (black) is supported.
Sam,
I am also affected by this problem. I understand the situation but this should have been announced in the blog post regarding the upgrade. This way we would have had the option to stay with the old version. But once we have upgraded and lost wifi connection the information it is not really useful.
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You can downgrade the kernel and should be able to do so without a network connection - but keep in mind that this isn’t an ideal solution for the long term.
So should I start a new topic regarding the official osmc WiFi (black) dongle issue that I’m experiencing?
Yes, you can do so.
I am looking in to this now.
Are you able to hook up a Wired connection and upload a log?
Sam
I’m going to jump in on this discussion, if that’s okay –
I lost WiFi after updating today on a Pi 2B with an external USB WiFi adapter TP-Link TL-WN822N, which shows up as a Realtek device in DMESG:
2.913116] usb 1-1.5: new high-speed USB device number 5 using dwc_otg
[ 3.044643] usb 1-1.5: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8178, bcdDevice= 2.00
[ 3.044664] usb 1-1.5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 3.044674] usb 1-1.5: Product: USB WLAN
[ 3.044682] usb 1-1.5: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 3.044692] usb 1-1.5: SerialNumber: 00e04c000001
It doesn’t even turn on now, and I’m wondering if there’s a way for me to load a separate driver for it.
My linux admin chops are very limited –
I tried to apt-get install the “firmware-realtek” package, but that failed:
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/firmware-realtek_20161130-5_all.deb (–unpack):
trying to overwrite ‘/lib/firmware/RTL8192E/boot.img’, which is also in package wireless-firmware-osmc 1.1.4
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/firmware-realtek_20161130-5_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
From browsing it seems that reverting to the previous version isn’t all that easy, and I can’t flash a new SSD card at the moment…
Any pointers for getting the WiFi to work, or is there any way to downgrade the kernel just over ethernet?
Logs are very long because of library scan errors – can I just send one with specific essential flags?
Thanks
Hi,
This is a Realtek adapter – and support for that specific chipset is now deprecated.
A kernel downgrade won’t need a network connection, unless you’ve opted to not retain kernel packages (which is a command line configurable preference). You can access the command line without using SSH. See Accessing the command line - General - OSMC.
Sam
I can ssh over ethernet, but I don’t really know what a kernel downgrade entails. Should I just Google that term, and do you think that would restore the WiFi capabilities I had a couple hours ago? Thanks. Kodi was working just fine for my purposed this afternoon 
I’ll give you some more details in the morning.
Sam
Awesome. Thanks. I’m good with a big wire stretched out across the kitchen for the weekend.
I didn’t test but I think the command you are looking for is
sudo apt-get install --reinstall rbp2-image-4.14.78-4-osmc
Quite, or rbp1 if Pi0/1 and that shouldn’t mandate a connection.
I’ll pick things up in the morning and also outline the reasons we need to move the kernel forward
Sam