Wifi Adapter not Found on X1 Carbon 3rd Gen

Question

I recently installed Debian onto my 3rd gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon and am having some issues with getting WiFi to work. I tried following quite a few different suggestions online and none seem to be helping me - here is some info about my machine and what I have done already. Bluetooth works perfectly.

Output of nmcli device:

DEVICE  TYPE     STATE       CONNECTION
enp0s25 ethernet unavailable --
lo      loopback unmanaged   --

And the response of lspci doesn't have a wireless controller inside. Ethernet Controller is Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (3) I218-LM (rev 3).

Output of sudo dmesg | grep iwl is nothing.

I can't run modinfo because it isn't installed.

My computer has an Intel 7265 Wireless card, and I've tried downloading both the drivers from here - List of firmware in Linux kernel and dropping them into /lib/firmware, which didn't work for me. Nothing appeared to change.

I tried following this guide - Re: wifi not working on my new lenovo thinkpad x-1 but it requires installing software onto my laptop without internet, which I can't easily do. Keryx doesn't appear to be working anymore, and I can't install software with its dependencies onto my X1 Carbon effectively over bluetooth.

Any advice or suggestions?

The common way is to install the firmware-iwlwifi package from the non-free repository. See wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi. — Freddy, Jan 19 '20 at 20:44
I am not able to install software with dependencies easily. I can drop the files onto the computer via bluetooth but outside of that I can't install software onto the machine. Any advice on how I could do that? — aku, Jan 19 '20 at 20:50
Can you download the package from http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-iwlwifi_20190114-2_all.deb (assuming you're running buster) and install it manually? — Freddy, Jan 19 '20 at 21:00
Yes! I just installed the package onto my machine and restarted, internet works now! Thank you so much! — aku, Jan 19 '20 at 21:13
Could you please write a short answer and accept it later? Thank you! — Freddy, Jan 19 '20 at 21:15
Sure! Freddy, I have another question for you - now that the firmware for this wireless adapter is installed, if I installed a different distro (like Arch or Fedora) would internet work out of the box or would I have to go through a similar process again? How would I install this without apt? — aku, Jan 19 '20 at 21:19
I'm not sure, but I would guess other distros come with the firmware out-of-the-box. For Debian I tend to use the non-free ISO images for installations, because I'm too lazy to use an ethernet cable to install missing stuff. — Freddy, Jan 19 '20 at 21:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 19 '20 at 21:38

Download and install the firmware for your device's wireless adapter. If your device uses an Intel WLAN adapter, follow this guide.
If your device isn't connected to the internet, the iwlwifi firmware can be installed without an internet connection:
1. Download the iwlwifi firmware from here.
2. Move the .deb file to your device.
3. Install the file:

$ sudo dpkg -i /path/to/deb/file
$ sudo apt-get install -f

Restart your machine. Internet should now work!

Wifi Adapter not Found on X1 Carbon 3rd Gen

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