I just bought a lenovo yoga 14. It’s a beautiful 2-in-1 with a ryzen 7 5800u in it. The problem is that the wifi card is unreliable and can’t be recognized in Linux of any flavor.
I want to buy a replacement for it, so I want to know what you suggest and why. Right now, this is the bottleneck of my system, so I want to get the best card I can find that will fit in this machine, be usable on Ubuntu, and open up its full potential.
Until you get suggestions for better cards, have you tried any driver packages from any GitHub repo’s in the mean time?
I have a usb Realtek, and had to grab some driver for it.
I hope this forum is newb-friendly
I don’t know how to do that. I saw some posts about it on reddit and askubuntu, but while it’s booted into Ubuntu, the wifi card doesn’t get seen at all - and since there’s no ethernet port, I can’t figure out how to connect.
Is there a way I can download whatever I might need onto a flash drive from my other laptop and install the driver from there?
To be fair, I’m sure there is, but I haven’t done that before, so would just be speaking hypothetically.
And still hoping someone might suggest an Intel wifi chip or something.
I’m the mean time, if you have a computer with the internet (and a usb drive) then for sure give it a go sneaker net ing the driver across
As for seeing the card, might try
lspci
Ls is like a “dir” type tool, and the lspci app lists pci devices on the computer.(there is also lsusb for usb, and others)
You could also run a deeper check once you know the pci address, like the 0000:00a1:00.0 or whatever the undetected card has:
lspci -knnv -s 0000:00a1:00.0
The -s is before the address, and there are a bunch of useful -dnkv type options one could run.
If the device even shows up…
WATCH OUT.
You may need to patch the BIOS of your Lenovo to support all cards.
Lenovo laptops will lock up with error 1802 (unauthorized wireless card) if you replace it without modifying the BIOS.
If you cannot modify the BIOS, you are SOL.
Can you point me to a guide on that? I don’t know what I would need to do in order to get it working.
You have to use a BIOS flasher to extract the raw BIOS and then patch it and flash it back. This is extremely complicated and risky. Wendell has done this to add Thunderbolt to Threadripper, and you will have to do this to patch the Wifi card whitelist.
Not only that, recently it was revealed Lenovo used a hardware fuse to lock AMD mobile CPUs to specifically their motherboards.
My advice: You will lose money either way, but get a AX200 Intel Wifi card and try it out. If the board complains, there’s nothing you can do if you can’t modify the BIOS.
So perhaps a USB device might be better than a PCI device?
like a USB wifi dongle?
(or a USB rj45/ethernet dongle…)
USB ones don’t have any BIOS locks. But most of the smaller Wifi ones that are more reliable are 2.4Ghz only.
I have a realtek ax wifi in my wife’s laptop.
I found a rtw89pci driver on GitHub that I was able to build and get working on Fedora
I could see A promising project on GitHub but OP does not have internet.
Presumably there is a way to download all the gut and build/make tools needed, on his other laptop, plus clone the project.
But, I wouldn’t have a clue where one would start.
Hi everyone. I want to give a final update on the situation so anybody who reads this in the future can try what I did.
I asked on the Lenovo forums and it turns out that my model (Yoga 14cACN) cannot take the intel card. The only other option was a different mediatek card which also doesn’t have great reviews. So I considered the USB dongle, but right before I went to the store, I saw a suggestion to tether my phone to the computer for internet. It worked. Very simple to connect the phone and then turn on USB tethering in the android settings.
Linux immediately showed a wired connection. From there, I went to \lwfinger/rtw89 repository and followed the installation instructions top to bottom. Once I got to the modprobe command to load the drivers, everything worked fine.
FWIW, prior to even being able to install Ubuntu, I had to turn off Fast Boot (Windows 10), BitLocker (actually had to turn it on and then off), and I turned off Safe Boot.
Since getting Ubuntu operational was my primary concern, I’m going to keep this for the time being. Thank you to everyone for helping with input, warnings, and suggestions. People like you make the tech community a shining beacon (as opposed to the cesspool that the internet can be).
That is awesome! Never considered tethering the phone, but now I’m gonna for sure give that a go…
Thanks for getting back to us, and letting us know how you got it going, that helps future converts too!
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