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I got Debian 11 installed on my laptop as Standard System Utils. I've been having issues with the network card that I have when installing so I couldn't connect to my network in the installation but got the firmware for my network card after installation and it's running (hopefully) correctly when I check lspci which gives 01:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9260 (rev29) as well as checking systemctl status networking which gives Loaded: loaded (lib/systemd/system/networking.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active(exited) in the block of code.

Checking the /etc/network/interfaces only gives me the loopback network interface as well as in ip a.

I want to connect to my network but I can't figure it out. I've checked on guides and such but most of the commands for those packages I don't have. I tried installing NetworkManager from my usb but gave me an error saying that dpkg: error: unknown option -n after entering dpkg -install /mnt/network-manager_1.30.0-2_amd64.deb. Anyone know how I can connect to my network?

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  • long options use TWO dashes, while short options use ONE. dpgk -i package OR dpkg --install package! With dpkg -install it assumes that both -i and -n, as well as -s -t -a -l (twice) are all selected as option flags, but most, like -n do not exist for dpkg. Thus the error message.
    – FelixJN
    Jan 12, 2022 at 22:30

2 Answers 2

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TL;DR: Use dpkg -i (single dash) or dpkg --install (two dashes).

dpkg -install does nothing you want, because of a quirk in the difference between short and long options.

With a single dash, most unix commands will assume that every subsequent letter is a separate option, and a subsequent argument applies to the option denoted by the last letter.

So dpkg -install would be equivalent to dpkg -i -n -s -t -a -l -l, and (thankfully) more than half of those are not actual recognized flags so dpkg quit with an error message rather than blithely do what the separate flags might have suggested.

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for the wifi hardware mentioned, you also need some extra packages:

firmware-iwlwifi
intel-microcode
firmware-misc-nonfree

from non-free section.

To find if you have non-free section enabled in /etc/apt/sources.*, and packages are available, try:

$ apt-cache policy firmware-iwlwifi
firmware-iwlwifi:
  Installed: 20210315-3
  Candidate: 20210315-3
  Version table:
 *** 20210315-3 500
        500 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/non-free amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

you may have to may be download those packages' deb files on USB drive and copy to your system. then run

$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

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