Installing wireless driver (realtek 8188CE) on Debian wheezy

Question

I had a hard time installing the wireless driver for my debian. My debian was Sqeeze but soon after I realized Wheezy was the one to support my wireless adapter, realtek 8188CE,I upgraded to wheezy. Here is my sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

I followed the exact steps listed on the Debian wiki. At step 4, after I typed in iwconfig,there was no tag for wifi (shouldn't it be there?), I figured the wifi module was not loaded, but I didn't know how to check and add it

Here is my printout:

clint@Thinkpad-W520:~$ lspci | grep -i wifi
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE      802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (rev 01)

The iwconfig output:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

pan0 no wireless extensions.

Answer 1

It went perfect for me:

For starters list what pci devices are currently present

% lspci
....

07:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (rev 01)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 05)

Modify /etc/apt/sources.list

% deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

install updates

% apt-get update

install realtek & wireless tools

% apt-get install firmware-realtek wireless-tools

confirm wirelss is working

% iwconfig

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off

eth0      no wireless extensions.