Ability to swap out components like wifi cards?

Hardware
1

Hi, great work you’re doing for the OSS community!

In looking through some of the system specs, I was curious as to whether some of the hardware components are user-serviceable enough to support swapping them out for user-supplied components.

In particular, could the stock 802.11n card be replaced with one that supports 802.11ac? I understand that this could imply modifying the operating system with non-free blobs. I’m mostly interested in whether the underlying hardware is something like a mini-PCIe atheros card that could be disconnected and swapped out for a different card and recognized the the system board and reconnected to the antenna wires.

2

Thank you :wink:

Yes, WiFi card can be exchanged, it is a NGFF type card. I did the same for testing purposes and plugged in an Intel WiFi card which worked nicely. But depending on the card type you may also loose the WiFi kill switch feature - seems that not all NGFF cards support a kill-switch signal. And of course the firmware blob issue… you may need to add non-free repositories from Debian to the PureOS sources list and install the matching firmware package.

Cheers
nicole

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