linux mint 16 not recognising laptop wifi card

[DJPoizon]

I have an Acer Aspire 1800 17" laptop, used to be running Windows XP, but I have installed Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon, since Windows will soon not be supporting XP.

According to the Acer website, I have a Foxconn wifi card in the laptop, but Linux only shows an ethernet connection.
I have the driver for the wifi card (windows only install, not found a linux version) but I can't install it to see if that would solve anything.

I have tried several commands with no luck. If anyone can help me with this, it would be much appreciated.
Thank you.

[sicarie]

1) What is the exact name of the hardware card? Do you have a link to the Acer page that shows the hardware?

2) Are the wifi drivers installed? How did you confirm they were/were not?

3)Have you tried to bring the wifi up manually? (ie, something like opening a terminal and typing something like 'ifconfig wlan0 up')

Apologies, I'm not too familiar with Mint - I'll take a look at it and see what package manager it uses.

[Nepomuk]

Hi DJPoizon and welcome to bytes.com!

There are a few possible reasons for this problem; one would be whether the system recognizes the WiFi device at all. Check the output of both sudo ifconfig and sudo iwconfig to see what shows up; hopefully there is more than just one eth0 device. If it doesn't show up you may have to install proprietary drivers; I've never done that on Mint but I'm sure you can find instructions on how to do that online.

@sicarie: Linux Mint is Debian-based.