ACER aspire F5-571 & Qualcomm Atheros wireless not working

Support & Help Requests Hardware
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#1

Dear All, Ive recently purchased the subject laptop which is preloaded with windows 10 (yuk - I tried it) and I want to load my trusty ubuntu-mate on it. Some issues with the partitioning etc but thats for another time. I have found when booting from a live usb the wireless does not work. It is the latest version of Ub-M (15.10), wired is ok, but kind of defeats the object of a laptop.

As lshw -C network gives:
*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Network controller
product: Qualcomm Atheros
vendor: Qualcomm Atheros
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
version: 30
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:c1000000-c11fffff

The BIOS version of the machine is v1.31. I have been reading about issues re the wireless from older versions of ubuntu but the fixes for those issues do not work, also ive read about an issue with v1.25 of the bios but nothing about issues with 1.31.

Any thoughts/fixes or ideas welcome. Would love to solve this as fast as possible (of course).

Thanks

Andy

Still a way to go for Linux
#2

Hi

I have a ACER Aspire Es 15 and had the same problem as you with the wireless not working.
i did some digling around on the net and found a fix.

have a look at my post here :- http://bit.ly/1Me9DWX

#3

Thanks, I tried with a live distro on usb with persistence but the modified file doesnt survive. is there a way to reinitialise without a reboot? (I have yet to solve the installing alongside windows 10 problem - none of the solutions on line seem to work! I am hoping to dual boot)

#4

I think you need to do reboot to so that the changes can take effect. I don’t think you can do this on a live USD / CD.

I too due boot nafdows 10. I did the install with wired network pluged in for the updates. the ubuntu Mate installer and it helped with settings up the partitions for a due boot.

#5

Hi All, so - now have ubuntu-mate installed on its own on the laptop, found some bios tweaks to get it to boot. Needed to specify an efi file manually, took a while but thanks to the forums…

Anyway back to sqr 1, boots lovely, connects to wired, but the procedure you give doesn’t work. Makes perfect sense but no joy I’m afraid.

Any other suggestions?

#6

For people reading this with the same issue, there is a bug report for this open:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1436940?comments=all

Unfortunately for me, none of the work arounds seem to work, so I hope that those involved will help overcome this issue for Xenial.

#7

For anyone else, I have now found a solution, courtesy of the great guys at the ubuntu bugtracker. The card is supported in kernel 4.5 so…

Courtesy of Miles Krell:

  1. Install kernel 4.5. There’s a guide at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds.

  2. Assuming you downloaded the firmware as explained in the above guide, you have to rename just one file like this:

    cd /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/
    sudo mv firmware-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 firmware-5.bin

  3. Reboot your computer. Run “sudo lshw -C network” to see if the card is recognized.

  4. If it still isn’t working, run “uname -r” to make sure you’re running kernel 4.5.

I hope this helps people as much as it helped me.

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