If you have just installed BlackArch Linux on your laptop and after the installation your WiFi is not showing up at all, only Ethernet is visible in the network menu, do not worry. This is a very common problem on fresh Arch based systems, especially on laptops that use a Realtek wireless chip. In this article, I will walk you through the complete process, step by step, exactly how I fixed the WiFi issue on my own HP Victus gaming laptop. This covers everything from a missing WiFi driver to pacman mirror errors, package conflicts, and even GPG keyring corruption.
This guide is perfect for anyone using BlackArch Linux, Arch Linux, or any Arch based distribution such as Manjaro or EndeavourOS, and facing a similar issue. Let us get started.
Table of Contents
- 1. What The Problem Looked Like
- 2. Step 1: Check If The Interface Is Being Detected At All
- 3. Step 2: Check With rfkill Whether WiFi Is Blocked
- 4. Step 3: Identify The Hardware Chip Using lspci
- 5. Step 4: Try Loading The Driver Manually
- 6. Step 5: Fix The GPG Keyring First, Before Doing Anything Else
- 7. Step 6: Updating The System Is Essential
- 8. Step 7: A Lot Of "Replace" Prompts Show Up
- 9. Step 8: The Java JDK And JRE Conflict
- 10. Step 9: Python Typing Extensions And Uvicorn Conflict
- 11. Step 10: Finally Installing The WiFi Driver
- 12. Why Do All These Problems Happen
- 13. Important Tips To Remember
- 14. Conclusion
What The Problem Looked Like
After a fresh install, when I booted into the desktop, the taskbar only showed "Ethernet Network - disconnected." There was no WiFi option visible anywhere. This meant the wireless adapter was not being detected by the system at all, because if it were detected, at least a WiFi option would show up, even if it was not connected yet.
In such a situation, the first thing to check is whether the problem is with the hardware, the driver, or just a software setting. For that, you need to open a terminal and run a few basic commands.
Step 1: Check If The Interface Is Being Detected At All
The first step is to see whether the kernel can even see the network interfaces. Run this command in the terminal:
ip link
This command lists all the network interfaces present on your system. If you see only the loopback interface (lo) along with an ethernet interface like eno1 or enp2s0, but no interface starting with wlan0 or wlp, it means the wireless adapter's driver has not been loaded.
In my case, this is exactly what happened. The output of ip link only showed lo and eno1 (ethernet), with no trace of any wireless interface.
Step 2: Check With rfkill Whether WiFi Is Blocked
Sometimes WiFi gets blocked at the hardware or software level, which is why the OS cannot see it at all. To check this, use the following command:
rfkill listIf the output shows "Soft blocked: yes" next to "Wireless LAN," you can unblock it with:
sudo rfkill unblock all
However, keep in mind that if the WiFi device does not show up in rfkill list at all (in my case, only Bluetooth hci0 was listed), it means the issue is not about blocking, the adapter simply is not being detected by the kernel. In this situation, unblocking with rfkill will not help, and you need to check the driver directly.
Step 3: Identify The Hardware Chip Using lspci
This is the most important step. It will tell you exactly which WiFi chip is present in your laptop and whether its driver has been loaded. The command is:
lspci -k | grep -A 3 -i network
If you get a "command not found" error for lspci, install this package first:
sudo pacman -S pciutilsThen run the above command again. This command will show you the network controller's name, its subsystem, and a "Kernel modules" line. If the "Kernel driver in use" line is missing, it means the driver has not been loaded.
In my case, the output looked like this:
Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device b520
DeviceName: Realtek Wireless LAN + BT
Kernel modules: wlThis confirmed that my laptop has a Realtek Wireless LAN + BT chip, which is common in gaming laptops like the HP Victus (often the RTL8852BE WiFi 6 chip). The absence of the "Kernel driver in use" line showed that the driver was not actually being loaded, only its module name was listed.
Step 4: Try Loading The Driver Manually
Realtek WiFi 6 chips generally use drivers from the rtw89 family. To load it manually, try:
sudo modprobe rtw89_8852beIf you get an error, check the dmesg logs to find out whether the firmware is missing or the module is not available at all:
sudo dmesg | grep -i -E "realtek|rtw|firmware"
In most cases, the issue is with the firmware, which is part of the linux-firmware package. But if your system has not been updated, the older firmware package may not support the newer chip. This means the real fix is going to require a full system update, and before you touch anything else, there is one thing you should fix first, right at the start, so you do not waste time fighting the same error again and again later.
Step 5: Fix The GPG Keyring First, Before Doing Anything Else
This is the single most important tip in this entire article, and I am putting it early on purpose. On a fresh Arch based install, especially one that has sat on a USB drive for a while or has an ISO that is a bit old, the pacman keyring almost always becomes outdated. If you skip this step and go straight to updating the system, you will very likely run into a long list of errors somewhere in the middle of your upgrade that look like this:
error: xfce4-panel: signature from "Robin Candau <[email protected]>" is unknown trust
File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/xfce4-panel-4.20.7-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature))
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]This looks scary, as if your packages are actually corrupted, but they are not. This is purely a keyring trust issue, meaning pacman cannot verify the digital signatures of the packages because its local keyring database is outdated. The annoying part is that this error usually shows up after you have already sat through dozens of "Replace X with Y" prompts, so you end up redoing the whole upgrade from scratch. To avoid that completely, run these commands right now, before you do the system update:
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman-key --populate blackarch
sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring blackarch-keyringIf you still see keyring or signature errors after this, clear out the old cached packages as well, just to be safe:
sudo rm -rf /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*
sudo pacman -SccDo this first, and you will save yourself from having to restart the entire upgrade process later because of a corrupted signature error appearing halfway through. Now let us move on to actually updating the system.
Step 6: Updating The System Is Essential (This Is Where The Real Story Begins)
To properly install the WiFi firmware, you first need to fully update your system, because firmware packages also get updated over time. Since the keyring is already fixed from the previous step, you will not face signature errors here, but a few other issues can still show up, so let me walk you through each one.
The First Error: Community Repository 404
When I ran this command:
sudo pacman -Syu linux-firmwareI got this error:
community.db failed to download
error: failed retrieving file community.db from mirror.rackspace.com: The requested URL returned error: 404
This error occurs because Arch Linux officially merged its [community] repository into the [extra] repository back in March 2024. If your BlackArch ISO is a bit older, or your pacman.conf has not been updated, the system will still try to look for the [community] repo, which no longer exists. So every mirror will return a 404 error.
Fix: You need to open the pacman.conf file and comment out or delete the [community] section.
sudo nano /etc/pacman.confLook for these two lines:
[community]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Add a # in front of both lines to comment them out:
#[community]
#Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlistTo save, press Ctrl O, then Enter, then Ctrl X to exit.
After that, sync the database again:
sudo pacman -Syyu
Use -Syyu instead of -Syu, because the double y forces a refresh and ignores the old cached database, pulling fresh data instead.
Refresh The Mirrorlist Too
If your mirrors are slow or several of them are dead, you can build a fresh, fast mirror list using the reflector tool:
sudo reflector --latest 10 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
If this command says "not found," install it first with sudo pacman -S reflector.
Step 7: A Lot Of "Replace" Prompts Show Up During The Upgrade
When the full system upgrade runs, you will see a lot of prompts like these:
Replace kactivities with extra/kactivities5? [Y/n]
Replace kauth with extra/kauth5? [Y/n]
Replace ruby-json with extra/ruby? [Y/n]
This is completely normal. When the community repository was merged into extra, a lot of package names also changed (for example, KDE Frameworks packages now have a 5 suffix in extra, and many small ruby gems have now been combined into a single ruby package). You can safely type y for every one of these prompts.
Similarly, a prompt will appear for the qt6 multimedia backend:
There are 2 providers available for qt6-multimedia-backend:
1) qt6-multimedia-ffmpeg 2) qt6-multimedia-gstreamer
Here, type 1 and press enter, because the ffmpeg backend is generally more stable and widely compatible.
If you want every prompt to automatically say yes, you can use the --noconfirm flag:
sudo pacman -Syyu --noconfirm
But be careful, --noconfirm will also try to automatically handle conflicting packages, so it is safer to go through the upgrade manually the first time, to avoid accidentally removing the wrong package.
Step 8: The Java JDK And JRE Conflict
While the upgrade was running, a new error appeared:
error: unresolvable package conflicts detected
error: failed to prepare transaction (conflicting dependencies)
jdk-openjdk and jre-openjdk are in conflict
This issue happens when a system has multiple old Java versions installed at the same time (such as jdk-openjdk, jre-openjdk, jdk11-openjdk, and jre11-openjdk all together), and a version mismatch occurs between them, since jdk-openjdk already includes the JRE within itself.
First, I checked which Java packages were installed using pacman -Qs openjdk:
jdk-openjdk 20.0.1.u9-3
jdk11-openjdk 11.0.19.u7-1
jre-openjdk 20.0.1.u9-3
jre-openjdk-headless 20.0.1.u9-3
jre11-openjdk 11.0.19.u7-1
jre11-openjdk-headless 11.0.19.u7-1With this many Java versions installed together, a conflict is natural. The simplest and safest solution is to force remove all of them together, and then do a clean Java install once the upgrade is complete:
sudo pacman -Rdd jdk-openjdk jre-openjdk jre-openjdk-headless jdk11-openjdk jre11-openjdk jre11-openjdk-headless
The -Rdd flag skips dependency checks, which is safe here since we are removing all related packages together, so no broken state will be left behind.
After this, run the upgrade again:
sudo pacman -SyyuOnce the upgrade completes successfully, if you need Java, install it fresh:
sudo pacman -S jdk-openjdkThis will automatically bring in the latest matching JRE as well, and this time there will be no version conflict since the whole system will already be up to date.
Step 9: Python Typing Extensions And Uvicorn Conflict
After Java was resolved, a smaller conflict came up:
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
installing python-typing-extensions (4.16.0-1) breaks dependency python-typing-extensions required by python-uvicorn
This happens when a package in the BlackArch repository falls slightly out of sync with the main Arch extra repository. In other words, the version of python-uvicorn in the BlackArch repo is not compatible with the newer typing-extensions.
The safest fix here is to ignore just that one package during the upgrade, so that the rest of the system can update normally:
sudo pacman -Syyu --ignore python-uvicornThis lets all the other packages update successfully, while skipping only uvicorn, which can be updated or reinstalled separately later once the BlackArch repository syncs up.
Step 10: Finally Installing The WiFi Driver
Once the system is fully updated, actually fixing the WiFi becomes easy, because by now a new, updated linux-firmware package will be present on the system, which will also include the necessary firmware for the Realtek WiFi 6 chip. Check this with:
sudo pacman -S linux-firmwareAfter that, reboot the system:
sudo reboot
After rebooting, run ip link again and check whether an interface starting with wlan0 or wlp is now visible. If the chip is a Realtek RTL8852BE type, the rtw89_8852be module should load automatically along with the new firmware. If it still does not show up, you may need to install a specific DKMS driver package from the AUR (such as realtek-rtw89-dkms-git), for which you will need an AUR helper like yay.
Once the interface is visible, make sure the NetworkManager service is enabled and running:
sudo systemctl enable --now NetworkManagerAnd for the applet:
nm-applet &After this, the list of WiFi networks will start showing up in your taskbar, and you can select and connect to your wireless network.
Why Do All These Problems Happen
If you are wondering why so many problems occurred all at once, the simple answer is this: when a fresh BlackArch or Arch based install has not been updated for a long time, or when the ISO is a bit old, a gap forms between the system's internal repositories and the upstream Arch repositories. The merging of the community repo, the renaming of Java packages, the version mismatch in Python packages, and the outdated keyring all happen because of this same gap. Once the system is fully synced, future updates generally do not bring this many problems at once.
Important Tips To Remember
The first and most important tip is to fix the GPG keyring before you do anything else, right at the start, using pacman-key --init and --populate. This one step alone will save you from redoing the entire upgrade halfway through.
The second tip is that whenever you install a new Arch based system, run sudo pacman -Syyu to fully update the system, even before installing the WiFi driver. This can help you avoid most of the problems described above.
The third tip is that -Syyu is better than -Syu when there are mirror or cache issues, since the double y forces a refresh of the cached database.
The fourth tip is that whenever multiple similar packages (like different Java versions) are causing conflicts, handle them all together rather than one at a time, since they tend to be dependent on each other.
Conclusion
BlackArch Linux is a powerful distribution built for security researchers and penetration testers, but it does require some manual setup right after installation, especially when the hardware uses a Realtek WiFi chip that is not directly supported by the default firmware. In this guide, we saw how a simple "WiFi not showing" problem led us through fixing the keyring first, then the pacman community repository error, Java conflicts, and Python dependency issues, and how each one was solved step by step, in the right order this time, so you do not have to face the same errors twice.
If you are also getting similar errors on your BlackArch, Arch Linux, or any Arch based distribution, follow the steps above in order, starting with the keyring fix. In most cases, this entire process will fully update your system and get your WiFi working properly as well. If you still run into a specific error, it is usually best to search for that exact error message, since similar issues have generally already been discussed on Linux community forums.
If this article helped you, feel free to share it with your friends who use BlackArch or Arch Linux, so they do not have to go through this long troubleshooting process on their own.