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How to get rtl8723be working in Debian properly

I purchased a GNU/Linux HP Probook 455 G2 from ebuyer.com. It was shipped with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and everything worked well out of box. But in 2015 Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was pretty dated and I prefer Debian over Ubuntu so I installed Debian Jessie on it. There are known issues with rtl8723be on GNU/Linux and I experienced them after fresh Debian Jessie installation. There were no wireless networks visible and there was no wlan adapter listed after running ifconfig command in terminal.

Here is my simple solution to get rtl8723be working in Debian Jessie.

All commands have to be run with root privileges!


1. List PCI devices

To check for Realtek rtl8723be wireless network adapter list all PCI devices
$ lspci


2. Install newer kernel version

Open sources.list in editor to add backports repository
$ nano /etc/apt/sources.list
At the end add lines:
# backports
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie-backports main non-free contrib
To update packages list run apt-get update
$ apt-get update
Install new kernel
$ apt-get -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64
Reboot system and after reboot check kernel version (my machine runs 4.4.0-1-amd64 kernel)
$ uname -r
Try to run ifconfig command
$ ifconfig
Wireless adapter should be listed there (usually as wlan0)


3. Install realtek drivers from repositories

Install firmware-realtek drivers package
$ apt-get install firmware-realtek


4. Create config file for rtl8723be

Config file need to be created in /etc/modprobe.d/
$ tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf <<< options rtl8723be fwlps=0 swlps=0 ips=1 msi=1 debug=0
Last command creates config file and sets options for rtl8723be. Now reboot system and after reboot wireless adapter should work properly. This guide may work in other GNU/Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu or Mint, but firmware-realtek package may need to by downloaded and installed manually if not in repositories.