On the top right of your desktop screen, you will find the time and some smaller icons for networking, bluetooth, volume, etc.

To connect to a Wi-Fi network, simple choose the network from the list of available networks in the networking dropdown (top right).

  • If no networks appear, first make sure the “Enable Networking” is checked/on in that menu.
  • Then also make sure the “Enable Wi-Fi” is enabled as well.

If Wi-Fi is not shown (or no networks appear) in the menu then the most common issues are:

  1. some laptops have an external switch to enable/disable wi-fi (which may be turned off)
  2. the driver for your Wi-Fi card needs to be manually installed
  3. the Wi-Fi card is missing or broken

Physical/External Wi-Fi Switches:

Some computers have external physical switches to enable/disable networking and/or bluetooth.

If you have such a switch, please switch it to ON and then reboot your machine.

If your wi-fi then still doesn’t work, it is possible the switch prevented the proper driver from installing.

To prevent this from happening in the future, you can disable the switch altogether by modifying the BIOS on your machine:

  1. Upon startup, press the F2 key (sometimes F10) to enter your computer’s setup mode.
  2. Look for the wi-fi settings and disable the switch. See two screen shots below:

If your wi-fi networks still doesn’t show up, please use the instructions below to add a driver.

Adding a Driver for your Wi-Fi Card:

  1. Make sure your Laptop is connected to the Internet using an Ethernet cable. Test the web browser to make sure it works.
  2. Go to the Xubuntu menu (top left)
  3. Type “Additional” in the App search menu and choose the “Additional Drivers” App
  4. Wait a few moments for it to check the machine and then choose the custom driver for the wi-fi card (even if it says it’s not recommended).
  5. Check the networking dropdown menu again and choose the Wi-Fi networks you want to connect to.

Check if You Have a Wi-Fi Card

To check and see if your computer has wi-fi functionality built in, you can open terminal application and type the following command:

lspci -vnn | grep Network

or just

lspci -vnn

And look for the network device (check for 802.11, networking, Broadcom, etc.)

Additional Links:

If the above process does not work to add a driver for your wi-fi card, especially on a Dell 630 with a Broadcom card, you can try this link.