Replacing librem14 wifi card

Hardware
1

As I understand from physically looking at the card in the system, the wifi module is a m2 2230 standard slot, correct? I want a working card with 802.11ac or 802.11ax using the antennas already in the laptop.

The Qualcomm Atheros QCNFA222 card that ships with the librem14 does not work for me at all. lspci sees it, but ath5k/9k/10k/11k all fail to work with the card.

I have a spare Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (rev 1a) I can try. Just want to see if anyone else has had success before taking things apart again. Otherwise, I’ll buy something listed on h-node.

Thanks!

2

In this thread from 3 days ago, Nicole Faerber mentions:

Upgrading the WiFi card on Librem laptops is quite common and covered in detail in other threads.

Here is the thread with details on my experience setting up a WiFi card in PureOS.
Librem14 network adaptor unclaimed pureOS 10.0

3

Thanks for the pointers!

4

I finally had time to work on this. The Intel AX210 works great in the librem14v1. It’s supported in the 5.18 kernel just fine. When replacing it, neither antenna wire was connected to the original qualcomm card! There was tape over both connectors, but they were not snapped in place. The new intel card, despite the binary blob in the firmware, has vastly more reliable connection, pulls in wifi from further away, and I can sustain 500 mbps with ease with my local wifi AP. Given the state of the antenna wires, I’m not sure if the results I’m seeing are due to the new AX210 or the fact that the connectors are now snapped into place.

5

Blobs free?

6

This would have a not-insignificant impact on performance.

7

No. Requires a blob.

1 Like
8

I purchase Intel AX 210 AX Wifi 6 and Firecuda 530 4TB SSD and replace and it’s worked.

9

BTW, I am using ubuntu 22.04 LTS instead PureOS.

1 Like
10

Yes, here’s some relevant output from journalctl -k

Jun 28 09:06:17 archlinux kernel: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux

Jun 28 09:06:17 archlinux kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2

Jun 28 09:06:17 archlinux kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver

Jun 28 09:06:17 archlinux kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.0.2.36

Jun 28 09:06:17 archlinux kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: loaded firmware version 71.058653f6.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode op_mode iwlmvm