rtl8723be driver issues in Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS and Redhat Linux (RHEL).

I could see many people bug the developer with silly questions... I faced this issue on both Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora.  What I found is, the driver which Ubuntu, CentOS, or Fedora shipped is the latest one. There is no need of downloading and compiling the drivers again, without testing the installed driver with different antenna selections. In most cases re-enabling the kernel module with correct antenna selection would help. (I think it will work in Redhat as well. But not tested.)

Let me share my finding...

To fix this you have to unload the current kernel modules and then insert them again with the new antenna selection... In my case, In Ubuntu the antenna was 2,  in centOS7 and Fedora, it was 1.

So here are the steps (which I did).

In UBUNTU (16.10, 17.04)

## Unload the current module ##
sudo modprobe -rv rtl8723be

## Reload it with new option. ##
sudo modprobe -v rtl8723be ant_sel=2

## this step will help you to keep the same changes even after the reboot)  ##
echo "options rtl8723be ant_sel=2" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/50-rtl8723be.conf 

In CENTOS 7.x and FEDORA 25

## Unload the current module ##
sudo modprobe -rv rtl8723be

## Reload it with new option. ##
sudo modprobe -v rtl8723be ant_sel=1

## this step will help you to keep the same changes even after the reboot)  ##
echo "options rtl8723be ant_sel=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/50-rtl8723be.conf 

Try this first. If your first antenna selection is not working then go with the other one (1 and 2). Trust me guys, It will work. 

Still, facing issues?? Then download the driver and install it manually. (maybe in older versions of Linux)

Download it Here

(The installation steps may require additional packages like make, GCC, kernel-devel, and kernel-headers. install it according to the distribution you are using ) 

UBUNTU

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc g++ build-essential dkms

FEDORA/CENTOS

sudo yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers




After download, unzip it and compile it. Then re-insert the module with the antenna selection option. 

cd <path to the Downloads>
unzip rtlwifi_new-rock.new_btcoex.zip
cd rtlwifi_new-rock.new_btcoex/
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe -rv rtl8723be
sudo modprobe -v rtl8723be ant_sel=2

echo "options rtl8723be ant_sel=2" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/50-rtl8723be.conf

(Leave a comment about your experience. Let me know it worked for you or not. )