I'm using Fedora 42 on my ThinkPad T14s G3, and I've been having trouble connecting to my university's new WiFi network, which now has a captive portal. When I try to connect, the portal page doesn't show up at all. I've already contacted a technician and had my MAC address whitelisted, but that hasn't resolved the issue. Interestingly, when I boot into Ubuntu on the same laptop, it connects right away without needing the portal login. Does anyone have an idea of what could be going wrong with Fedora?
1 Answer
It sounds like your desktop environment might not be handling the captive portal correctly. Typically, desktop environments like Gnome or KDE do a decent job of detecting connectivity issues and should prompt you to log in. Since you mentioned it's not working in Fedora but is fine in Ubuntu, it could relate to the kernel or drivers for your WiFi.
One workaround is to manually get the URL for the captive portal from your IT department and save it as a bookmark so you can access it directly in your browser when you connect. Also, make sure you're using a browser that detects captive portals well—Firefox usually does the trick.
Tried accessing the URL directly but that didn't help. My WiFi chipset is QCNFA765. Do you think that could be a factor?