Hello everyone. I recently decided to breathe life into an old pc of mine by installing Zorin OS Lite. Everything works perfectly, except for wifi. I have installed the drivers for the usb wifi adaptor, and it can detect nearby networks. It also connects to my phone hotspot and portable hotspot, yet it doesn't connect to my home wifi.
Whenever I try to connect, the loading circle moves in the taskbar, and after a long time, it again asks me to confirm the password. Then again the loading circle appears and again the same password window. This goes on and on and it refuses to connect. As mentioned earlier, it connects fine with my phone and portable hotspots, and also with ethernet.
Could anybody please suggest a solution? I am totally a newbie to Linux, but willing to learn.
Also, are the wifi router settings are to blame, as it is on CCMP and not TKIP?
@NoobieNewbie Hi and welcome to the Forum.
Is your home wifi operating on a channel outside the range that your old pc can use?
(I am asking as someone found that was source of their wifi failure)
What wifi adapter does your machine have?
Thank you so much for replying.
I don't know the model exactly, except that it is a Frontech one(they aren't that reliable though) and it is using the rtl8188fu driver for Linux.
As for the channel, the router supports both 2.4 and 5ghz, and the adaptor supports only 2.4. Yet I am pretty sure I am connecting to the 2.4 one, as I had hidden the 5ghz ssid before.
If you need more details, I am ready to give them. 
The adaptor did work in windows 10, but it had a different driver and didn't connect properly. (At that time, I was pretty young, and didn't know much about what I was doing 
)
Hmmm. So in sunmmary: your wifi is working, just not to that router. I take it that you have set up 2.4 and 5ghz as separate SSID's, Zorin is seeing your 2.4Ghz SSID but just spins instead of connecting to it.
Can you change to a different 2.4Ghz channel on your home router and try again?
If you do a websearch, you can enter your wifi adapter and ubuntu 18.04 and see if anything good comes up.
Here is one for starters. networking - How to install Wi-Fi driver for Realtek RTL8821CE on Ubuntu 18.04? - Ask Ubuntu
Another question: Have you disabled Secure Boot in your BIOS, that seems to crop up when this sort of problem is mentioned.
Ok, I will connect to a different 2.4 ghz ssid on the router and let you know.
As for the web search, I have been researching for the last day and found out the correct driver at a Ubuntu forum itself.
Yes, I think Secure Boot is disabled along with UEFI, but I will check.
Update: Secure Boot was disabled. The wifi still isn't connecting, even with a different ssid
I observed one thing though, when the mouse pointer is hovering on the network icon on the taskbar, a black box pops up saying "Configuring Wi-Fi network connection "My Ssid name".....".
Does that indicate anything?
Which driver did you install?
"different ssid" Does that mean you have tried it with a different router than your home router, or simply renamed your ssid?
I can only guess it is trying to configure your wifi with your ssid.
I'm a bit at a loss, as I have not suffered your problem myself.
Maybe someone like @Aravisian may come along and impart his wisdom? Particularly as it is Zorin Lite you are using.
I installed the Rtl8188fu driver which I found out by googling my bus id of my adaptor from the lsusb terminal command
It was from this forum topic:
I have tried it with a portable hotspot and my phone, and it connects normally with internet connection. I then created another ssid on my home wifi router, yet I couldn't connect to the router. Probably there is some configuration on my home wifi router which is preventing the adaptor from connecting to it. I will try and fiddle around with the wifi settings and see if it is fixed.
Any suggestions on which settings to configure would be greatly appreciated.
It could be multiple issues, do you have access control turned on in the router? You may have to manually add the Mac address to allow that device then. Depending on your adapter, isolated networks can be an issue (each device seperate from all other devices in the network), disabling that may help. Try manually setting the ip address and netmask with a default route of your router. If this works, you're router may need a reboot, there is an issue with dhcp. Also check the amount of allowed connections on the router.
On your laptop go into the wifi settings and change the proxy to automatic. This setting sometimes interferes or rejects connections when it's off.
What is the model of your router?
I don't think it's your network card in issue because it can see the network. I believe the problem is in your router settings.
I hope one of these fixes it for you, but come back if you're still having issues.
Sorry for the late reply.
I couldn't see access control was on or off in the router configuration page. I did manually add the Mac Address on the router settings. But it still didn't work.
As for isolated networks, I couldn't find a similar setting. Could you please drop a hint as to where it could be located?
I manually added the ip and netmask via the Edit Connections on Zorin, but it still doesn't work.
Max number of allowed connections on the router is 22, yet that shouldn't be the problem as there are only 10 devices including the old pc using wifi.
Proxy setting was on automatic, still doesn't work.
I added the ip address and netmask using Edit Connections on Zorin, yet it couldn't connect.
I don't know exactly, it is supplied by the ISP, and serves my purpose pretty well.
I also think so, as when Windows was installed, the adaptor would get disconnected pretty frequently only on my home wifi.
One small thing, when I change the network from Client to Hotspot in Edit Connections, the wifi connects, the symbol appears on the taskbar, but there is no internet. Could this signify anything?
My problem is solved.... Yay!!!
I cleared the connection from Edit Connections and when I joined again, it connected
I myself don't know how it happened 
I had previously tried it, but it hadn't worked. Probably the pc is now feeling sorry for his old friend.
Thank you so much @zabadabadoo and @337harvey for helping me out. I am extremely grateful for your support.
Make sure you go through your router settings and schedule a reboot once a week or two weeks.... depends on the model (probably a Motorola though there is a model that starts with a, i don't remember the name of the manufacturer, the providers have been supplying) whether your able to specify how often. The sticker on the back will tell you the manufacturer and model. Searching "how to " and what you want to do with the model number and it should give you results to configure it if you're not sure what you're doing.
Not all routers have isolation and a quick switch for access control. Digging around in the menu pages can give you a better sense of what the routers capabilities are and how to do things in it.
Like your phone, router restarts are important to clear memory leaks, empty cache and force updates that may not occur until much later. So ensure that the router reboots regularly during the least active time at least once a month if not more. I normally set them up for once every two weeks.
Any major changes require you to restart the services if not the router to begin enforcing them. Adding the Mac address and clearing the cached connecting is what did it, but that requires the router restart because changes are not made to the running service in memory. The new rules had to be added to the service by the router to be enforced.
I'm glad my post was able to assist you.
Thank you so much. I didn't know restarting the router helps clear connectivity issues. I found out the model on the configuration page, and downloaded the manual from the ISP website (the ISP manufactures their own routers) and there it was written that restarting that router twice every week is a good practice. I did restart it, and the range has increased.
Thank you so much for help, you helped me learn so much.
Btw, I am thoroughly enjoying Zorin and Linux in general, I guess I don't need gates and windows on my primary pc too.
18 posts were split to a new topic due to this thread already being marked as Solved by original O.P.: Zorin 15.3 lite Ralink RT-2500 no wifi
Do what I did with the same problem. Dump Zorin Lite - let them sort it out.
Since these issues are hardware specific, the ZorinGroup may not have a way to resolve this, both because they don't have your hardware and any solution that fixes your issue may cause an issue on another configuration. Because of this, each individual is responsible for getting things working (you may have newer hardware than the current kernel supports, proprietary hardware and even the combination of new and older hardware that could cause such issues). The forum members are more than glad to assist anyone in resolving the issues, but you have to want to learn and act. This isn't windows. It takes time to learn and fixing issues is one way to do that.
Anyone who doesn't want control of their system or learn something new is always free to return to Windows or run another distro.