No wIfI after Mobian update

[crakabeats]

Hello, after updating Mobian three days ago wifi and bluetooth ceased to exist.  I have the convergence dongle so was still able to connect to net.  Pinephone does not have a SIM at this time.  I have reflashed with Postmarket Phosh, Postmarket Smxo, (both are snappy but did not help with the wifi), and am now sitting with Manjaro Phosh.  Hitting the wifi icon does nothing in Manjaro.  Hitting it in Mobian would toggle but would not find any network.  Manjaro just sits there greyed out.  I am not familiar with Arch commands but have done the following:
inxi -n results in wlan0 state: down
nmcli g (and r) results WIFI  enabled
ip a results in wlan0 DOWN

I have toggled the hardware micro DIP switch at the back on the Pinephone.

Bluetooth in Mobian and Postmarket said to insert a dongle.  It's the same chip and switch, but I would just like wifi up.  Do I have a wifi brick?

Any ideas anyone?

[Stringbean]

I have a very similar issue, my pinephone has no wifi or bluetooth, they just stopped working suddenly, and booting into a new OS doesn't fix the issue, and I tried a lot of different images. Started happening a few months ago. Only the cellular works.

[emsyr]

Similar problem. Here is my post where I describe it with some detail :
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17118

[wifinoworkie]

Count me as another dead wifi+bt on PinePhone.
I've barely used this phone, just up and stopped working.
Never got around to getting it even usable as a phone, then hardware fault.
I've not done anything like firmware changes or anything particularly challenging.

I recently revisited it after giving up on making it useful, tried a few different images and then *poof*, up and stopped working.
This seems very much like a fundamental hardware flaw and seems to not be an uncommon problem that probably should find some people getting refunds...  You'd hope.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12667
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17118
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12126
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12076
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12745
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16734
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12506
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13013

It would seem from all those threads however that no one has had any positive resolution other than, the hardware is dead.
Maybe I'm not seeing those positive responses but it seems everyone has simply purchased their own replacement hardware?

[98cwitr]

***This is for PinePhone Pro*** but basically the upgrade removed wlan0 interface (according to dmesg | grep wlan) and the driver needs to be added back for the device to be seen by the OS (nmcli dev show wifi returns nothing)

Old thread but I've found the solution after this just happened to me.

Drop the firmware-brcm80211 package from Debian onto a usb drive (need dock for this) or microsd card and install:

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/all...1/download

sudo dpkg -i firmware-brcm80211_20230210-5_all.deb

Reboot and voila...wifi is back!

[baptx]

After upgrading from Mobian bookworm to trixie on the PinePhone by following the manual upgrade instructions on https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2025/10/ne...ting-keys/, I did not have any SSH access with my USB cable, no WiFi and no mobile network. The WiFi and mobile network did not appear in Phosh settings anymore, I could just see the network settings for USB. I could see the SSH server is running but the USB interface was down even when the cable was connected. Below is a solution I shared on Mobian Matrix channel in January.

To get WiFi in Phosh settings after upgrading from Mobian bookworm to trixie on the PinePhone, I had to download manually the firmware-realtek package https://packages.debian.org/trixie/firmware-realtek (new package in trixie) on a computer. It is similar to the post of 98cwitr on this thread.
Then send it to the PinePhone using Bluetooth that was still working. Remove the old package firmware-realtek-rtl8723cs-bt that does not exist anymore on trixie because the old package needs to be removed to install the new one.

This will also remove the pinephone-support package that is not used anymore on Mobian trixie, as we can see on https://packages.mobian.org, the new alternative package seems to be sunxi-support but it was not installed automatically:
sudo apt purge firmware-realtek-rtl8723cs-bt
sudo dpkg -i firmware-realtek_20250410-2_all.deb

For the mobile network and USB connection issues, it was because the kernel package linux-image-6.12.57+deb13-arm64 was installed during the upgrade. I fixed the issue by installing the PinePhone Linux kernel from Mobian repository:
sudo apt install linux-6.12-sunxi64
Then I removed the current kernel package.
Thanks to boriss from Mobian Matrix channel for the hint about a kernel issue which I also found mentioned on https://gitlab.com/mobian1/devices/sunxi.../issues/11 in this thread:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid113909

Later I noticed that v4l2loopback was not working (needed to record videos with preview using ffmpeg https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid122768), so I also had to replace the old Linux kernel headers package by the new one and reinstall v4l2loopback-dkms:
sudo apt purge linux-headers-6.6-sunxi64
sudo apt install linux-headers-6.12-sunxi64
sudo apt reinstall v4l2loopback-dkms

When rebooting after the upgrade from Mobian 12 to 13, I had to wait several minutes. There was a blue artwork from Plymouth because I accepted the new configuration during the upgrade.
The Mobian configuration can be used instead of the one from Debian, with this command (found on https://gitlab.com/mobian1/issues/-/issues/278):
sudo plymouth-set-default-theme mobian

It could be useful to mention these additional steps on https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2025/10/ne...ting-keys/ when upgrading manually to trixie on the PinePhone.