Good evening to all.
Still having issues with my wifi. Something that dawned on me is that when I have issues with my wifi, I can see other wifi access points in m community so I know the card is on. I can connect to either my 2.4ghz or 5.0ghz access point, but cannot actually go to a webpage.
Would this not indicate something wrong with per say…my browser…or my laptop gaining an ip address? I have run the latest iwconfig and it showed the below listed numbers.
wlp1s0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:“XXXXXXXXXXXXXX”
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.765 GHz Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Bit Rate=216 Mb/s Tx-Power=17 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=67/70 Signal level=-43 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:4 Invalid misc:216 Missed beacon:0
I can connect to the access point currently. The point is, even when I am having wifi issues, I can still run iwconfig and show numbers for the access point connected, but cannot open any webpages.
I am also seeing flaky wifi performance. This seems to be related to 5GHz. I split 2.4GHz and 5GHz into two different networks, and things are stable on the 2.4GHz band, less so on the 5GHz.
The reason it’s bad is because it uses an old Atheros 802.11n card. I used to have the same card
on my Lenovo x200 from 2009.
That’s a $5-7 (if not less) card on eBay, yes with free firmware, but the performance of a decade ago.
For those who don’t know, you have to half the 300Mbit by 2 (half input, half output) on each side of
the sender receiver, so effectively you end up with 75Mbit/s.
Invest around $10 and search for the “Intel 9260 Wireless-AC 9260NGW” card on eBay, swap that old
funny thing and enjoy acceptable - 500Mbit speeds. Or you can enjoy freedom but in 2009 standards.
I will maybe write a tutorial how to do that with Qubes and Librem 15, while keeping the firmware in sys-usb
so essentially you don’t care about if it’s free or even full of backdoors, since it only provides physical layer
and all the and other operations are done on other VMs.
Just imagine the killswitch “cutting the wire in half”. It doesn’t care what card you have, or what OS you have (even if Windows) - it’s a physical switch that disconnects the data wires that are crucial for the card to work.
If it is a card. If it’s just a chip on the board or part of a chip that does other things, it may be more difficult to cut the wire in half, metaphorically speaking.
I put an Intel 8260 in my Librem 15 v3 within the first month and I can confirm that the killswitch no longer works after that upgrade. Still worth it as the crappy wifi the laptop shipped with was unbearable.
I just installed an Intel 9260 ($20 on Amazon Prime) in my Librem 15 v4 and, voila! Excellent wifi.
The kill switch works.
Get the proprietary firmware from Intel and copy to /lib/firmware
Also, be careful when removing and reattaching the very small connectors on the antenna cables. They take very little pressure but they need to be aligned just so. In case you forget, the gray wire goes closer to the hinge.
So it seems like the fix to this moderately/majorly annoying issue is to replace the wifi chip?
Will someone at Purism please suggest a list of possible replacement chips they recommend (Librem 13 and 15) that do not compromise their free/open mission? I imagine there will have been some sort of short list when initially selecting the hardware.
In general, when replacing/upgrading hardware, I’m sure the community would appreciate if Purism were to host or curate such lists.
If there were alternative modules with better performance and free drivers, they would use them.
The problem is not the module, it’s the free driver needing optimization. You can also use the proprietary driver, but Purism can’t (and doesn’t want to) ship it.
reception has to do with the power of the signal and how it get’s transmitted/received so it’s more a proximity/hardware engineering problem than a linux-kernel-driver-module problem.
SOME aspects are indeed fixed and present in proprietary firmware but they could be present in the free-software ones if the manufacturers would AT-LEAST hand over proper documentation of the hardware.
So I replaced my Intel 8260 with an Intel 9260 in my Librem 15v3 and the difference was astounding.
Wireless KIllswitch works again.
Laptop appears to correctly enable the 9260 even during a cold boot (8260 required a warm reboot cycle to work)
8260 was having problems for me in kernel 5.1 that required me to turn wifi off and back on again to bring it back online occasionally. 9260 thus far does not appear to have this issue.
All in all, I’d say if you are looking for a better wireless module for your Librem 13 or 15 and you don’t mind a firmware blob, the Intel 9260 makes for an excellent choice. Thanks for sharing this info with me!
Amosbatto,
I sent my device in a few weeks ago and with the team’s help they found out I had a faulty wifi card. They will be sending it back to me very soon. When I get it back, hopefully all will be right with the world.
Has there been any word whether Redpine Signal’s Wi-Fi/Bluetooth with free Linux drivers will be ready for the Librem 5? I assume that Purism decided to use SDIO to communicate with the Wi-Fi, so that it doesn’t have to use the crappy Atheros Wi-Fi chip.
If there were alternative modules with better performance and free drivers, they would use them.
That is a little strange however. I think that for the ath9k series, the ath9k was the only driver available and the proprietary driver long abandoned.
I say this, because there are ath9k based chips, where the oss kernel driver is the only option, and even goes in combination with the open firmware from qualcom themselves: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
Granted, no driver is perfect, and some extra work simply may be needed or omitted here. But I don’t think the chips are that horrible by themselves. Buggy firmware is usually the cause (but again, I’m only familiar with devices using the open sourced firmware).
