There were  small changes in the /etc/network/interfaces, for instance no equal signs between options and their values, that I think are just for making people like me to be confused.

Marking this thread as solved, and many thanks again!

Use the /etc/network/interfaces format suggested in https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#W … d_WPA2-PSK instead.

What is the content of wpa_supplicant.conf? How did you generate it?

I generated it as I did for previous laptops: using wpa_passphrase to encode the key. Its contents are:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev

network={
  ssid="XXX"
  scan_ssid=1
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  psk=.......
}

Has this been deprecated?

The relevant lines of /etc/network/interfaces are

allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    pre-up wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -i wlan0

What is the content of wpa_supplicant.conf? How did you generate it?

It is more usual to just include the name of the access point and the (hashed) password in /etc/network/interfaces directly, as per https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#Using_ifupdown, have you tried that?

There has been some progress: using eth0 I could upgrade and update the system, with a new kernel version, 5.19, and the Realtek firmware of the version I sought:

[    3.868460] rtw89_8852ae 0000:01:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0003)
[    3.871490] rtw89_8852ae 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware rtw89/rtw8852a_fw.bin
[    3.871504] rtw89_8852ae 0000:01:00.0: Firmware version 0.13.36.0, cmd version 0, type 1
[    3.871506] rtw89_8852ae 0000:01:00.0: Firmware version 0.13.36.0, cmd version 0, type 3
[    3.888028] rtw89_8852ae 0000:01:00.0: chip rfe_type is 1

However, with ifdown eth0 and ifup wlan0 the latter hangs and must be backgrounded. The kernel messages show also that some features are disabled:

[   66.744949] r8169 0000:02:00.0 eth0: Link is Down
[   79.935440] wlan0: authenticate with ec:1a:59:88:2f:25
[   79.935455] wlan0: bad VHT capabilities, disabling VHT
[   79.935457] wlan0: Invalid HE elem, Disable HE
[   80.158538] wlan0: send auth to ec:1a:59:88:2f:25 (try 1/3)
[   80.160026] wlan0: authenticated
[   80.160231] rtw89_8852ae 0000:01:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT/HE as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP
[   80.162542] wlan0: associate with ec:1a:59:88:2f:25 (try 1/3)
[   80.165039] wlan0: RX AssocResp from ec:1a:59:88:2f:25 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=1)
[   80.278693] wlan0: associated
[   80.350754] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready

Then no nameserver is seen with a Network unreachable error. So it seems that this command did not finish the network configuration. Moreover trying to turn off the interface also hangs and must be interrupted:

# ifdown wlan0
ifdown: waiting for lock on /run/network/ifstate.wlan0
^CGot signal Interrupt, terminating...
^C
#

The relevant lines of /etc/network/interfaces are

allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    pre-up wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -i wlan0

and here are the contents of /etc/resolv.conf

domain XXX
search XXX
nameserver 192.168.2.1

Is there any way of configuring manually the network, apart from adding IPs and hosts to /etc/hosts?

When you directly copy new firmware to /lib/firmware you need to build a new initrd to make that work.

I already read the https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5133 thread in this forum, and following a tip there I changed my router
DNS settings to point to OpenDNS. This solved the problem in my desktop, but not in the laptop.

I noticed that dig deb.devuan.org

• gets 125.228.189.120 with a warning recursion requested but not available[

• with the -4 option starts with the warning Message parser reports malformed message packet but the rest is identical

• with -6 it just freezes

host debuan.dev.org works fine with no option or with -4, but freezes with -6. So maybe this a problem of something trying to use ipV6 at some stage.

I also tried to use the mirror repo.ifca.es/devuan-cd by editing the apt sources list, but the results are similar.

I do not know if there is any relation with problems of Firefox that cannot access any web server. This may result from the avahi-daemon not being installed: I get rid of it because it created an interface etho:avahi that could not be  controlled by  ifup and ifdown, and that used some strange IP (not in the LAN).

Ceres now has the firmware from 2022-10-18 so you can use that.

Thanks a lot for your reply! I was not aware of the Ceres release, but if it is based on Debian unstable I could not find that version there some days ago.

I will try this tomorrow and will report back.

Ceres now has the firmware from 2022-10-18 so you can use that.

Add this to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ceres:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged ceres non-free

And add this to /etc/apt/preferences.d/ceres:

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable, n=ceres
Pin-Priority: -1

Package: firmware-realtek
Pin: release a=unstable, n=ceres
Pin-Priority: 500

Then

# apt update
# apt upgrade

Keep checking chimaera-backports though because that package will probably make it through in a few weeks. When it does remove the added files and reinstall the package from backports instead.

rtw89_pci 0000:03:00.0:  [FWBB][WARN][CMW] No specific sta connect

A lengthy search led me to this thread in kernel.org https://lkml.kernel.org/linux-wireless/ … tek.com/T/ that
advises the use of some options to the Realtek kernel modules (rtw89_core, rtw89_pci), and the use of the firmware version 0.13.36.0, while the latest one in Debian bullseye is 0.9.12.2.

So I got the bin file from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke … mware.git/ and I am now trying to find out what to do with it,
as I am confused with all the methods I found out in the net for upgrading firmware...

Is that enough to put the file in /lib/firmware/rtw89/ as in that thread, or is this unsafe? If unsafe what is the recommended method? The laptop is a HP with UEFI boot.

Thanks in advance for any help.