Getting WiFi rtl8723be to work in Debian

After crashing my previous laptop, I bought a HP 15-ba055ng that contains a rtl8723be Wifi card. However, under Linux the connection would become instable after a short while and refuse to reconnect. I needed to do a series of things to fix this:

  1. Apparently only 1 antenna is connected to the card while the card is configured to use a different antenna slot, leading to an abysmal signal. A new parameter was introduced in kernen 4.0.7 (or so) that lets on select the antenna in the kernel module.
    Create a file /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf and enter

    options rtl8723be ant_sel 1

    (the default is 0). This let to a much better signal reception (as visible by doing iwlist scanning). But it still did not help, connection got refused after a while.

  2. Some other options need to be changed to make it work. Most people say that disabling sleep parameter fwlps (FW control power save, default 1) helped. So, that would be adding fwlps=0 to the above line. I did that.In addition some claim, that setting ips=0 or msi=1 has helped them to get a better reception. Try it, I use ips=0, but msi=1 seemed not necessary, so that my current options look like this: options rtl8723be ant_sel=1 ips=0 fwlps=0
  3. Some claim that windows fasstboot mode needs to be disabled in order to make WiFi work reliably. (in case you dualboot) However, I have not tried that yet, nor found it necessary.

All this is on a Debian Jessie system. On a final note: I find it pretty sad that a laptop sold in 2016 has no 5Ghz capabilities. I did not even fact-check that before my purchase as it did not occur to me that this could be an issue.

Relevant links I used for trouble-spotting (plus a ton of other links I forgot about):

  • https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1461174/comments/35
  • https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/229221/rtlwifi-rtl8723befw-bin-wireless-stop-working-then-laptop-needs-to-reboot-to
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/635625/how-do-i-get-a-realtek-8723be-wireless-card-to-work
  • https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2304607&page=4
  • https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83641#c1