With LAN and WiFi both on, I can't connect my phone or printer via WiFi

Hello fine folks...

Here's my use case, which I'm unable to accomplish:

  1. I have two machines on my desk -- a Zorin 16.1 pc (my main machine), and a Win 11 laptop.

  2. I have both machines connected to the same wifi network. At the same time, I also have both of them connected using a small gigabyte lan switch to each other AND to the same network.

  3. So far, all is well. However...

  4. If I want to print from the Linux machine, I have to disconnect the lan connection. (My printer is a Samsung M2020, accessed via wifi.) This issue doesn't happen on the Windows machine.

  5. If I want to connect my Android phone to my Linux machine using Zorin Connect, I have to disconnect my lan.

  6. If lan and wifi are connected on the Linux box, anything external that uses wifi can't connect to the Linux box.

(7. The reason they're connected in this way is cos I do live sketchnoting on my main machine, and stream to meeting software using the laptop. That's why I have the lan connection... to couple the two machines so that I can have OBS Studio communicating fast over both machines. I may very well have the wrong idea on this one. But I prefer lan speed in general to my slower wifi speed. I also use BARRIER to share my mouse and keyboard between both machines.)

Any thoughts on how the heck to solve this? I've done around 20 hours of trawling through forums to get absolutely no leads on this.

Thanks very much for your help.

Blue skies
Roy

I can only assume this has something to do with your WiFi drivers

mind telling me what WiFi card you have installed?
you should be able to see that somewhere in the output of lspci as "Network Controller"

Thanks for the response, TGRush.

Just checked using lspci:

Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (rev 1a)

I suspect it's not the wifi driver though. My previous machine also had this issue, and it seems to be across several flavours of Ubuntu. (The two I've tried are Mint XFCE and Zorin.)

It's probably something in the network setup. But my skills are too... uh... let's say, "limited", to be able to figure that out.

What's so frustrating about this is that Windows doesn't seem to have this issue. (The previous machine was a dual boot -- Mint or Win10. On Mint, the hassle manifested. On Win10, no problems using both.)

Thanks again.

Was the printer setup on Windows first and shared from Windows? I wonder if you need to install the SAMBA drivers?

Just going to give this a try. Thanks! Will let you know if it works.

that is exactly why I suspected this to be bad drivers, though, this is AX200, which I've seen plenty of people have issues with

I'd suggest you look it up online some time :wink:

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