The following commands are run in a terminal. Open one by Ctrl+Alt+T.

To check what drivers your wireless adapter is currently using, you may run the following command:

sudo lshw -C network

• lshw lists information on your hardware


• -C network filters the output to only show the network class.

In the output, look for the entry with description: Wireless interface.

Here's the output from my Ubuntu:

alaa@aa-lu:~$ sudo lshw -C network

[sudo] password for alaa: 

  *-network               

       description: Wireless interface

       product: RTL8723AE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.

       physical id: 0

       bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0

       logical name: wlan0

       version: 00

       serial: 24:ec:99:21:c9:29

       width: 64 bits

       clock: 33MHz

       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless

       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rtl8723ae driverversion=3.8.0-27-generic firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.74 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn

       resources: irq:17 ioport:3000(size=256) memory:c3000000-c3003fff

In the configuration line (line before last), you'll see the driver currently being used by my card. I've highlighted it in the output.

Alternatively, you can use the command:

lspci -nnk | grep -A2 0280

• lspci lists information on your PCI connected cards


• -nnk instructs lspci to output more information about these cards (including the driver being used)


• | pipes the output to the next command


• grep 0280 filters the output to show lines containing 0280, which is the PCI class code for wireless PCI controllers in Ubuntu.


• -A2 shows two more lines of information.

Here's the output from my Ubuntu:

08:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723AE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter [10ec:8723]

    Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device [10ec:0724]

    Kernel driver in use: rtl8723ae

Once you determine the driver you're using, you can use the following command to show more information about it:

modinfo <driver-name>

To check what wireless drivers you currently have installed, but not necessarily being used by anything, you can do the following command:

find /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/net/wireless -name '*.ko'

The above command will list all drivers you have installed. This will probably be an exhaustive list, because these are preinstalled drivers on your Ubuntu to make it possible for people to use their wireless drivers as soon as they install Ubuntu.