Ahoy,I have some advice.
Gunnar said: > Please note that this is not the right mailing list; > [email protected] mainly deals with organizational aspects of > the Debian project. For user support, please ask in > [email protected] instead. I am hereby taking the liberty to move discussion there. > If my laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi is not supported by Debian 11 or 12, is it > possible to use a USB Wi-Fi adapter during installation to get internet > access? I'm glad to have stumbled on your mail. As Gunnar alluded to, a lot of Wi-Fi hardware requires proprietary firmware to be loaded in order to function. Put more intuitively, modern Wi-Fi hardware incorporates its own microprocessor for digital signal processing. For devices that need these firmware "blobs" to be handed to them by Linux each and every time they are turned on, the Debian Installer indeed is very smart about noticing this need and steering users to get things working right. The greatest strides in this regard have been made in the past two releases. Note that there are two different questions here: • can the Wi-Fi adapter be used on the installed system • can it be used during the installation with the Debian Installer such as for fetching packages over the network To the second question, I don't think it's tested very often, but in principle it ought to and I'll try to do a test after sending this mail. Hereafter I'll focus my attention on those 802.11n USB Wi-Fi adapters that don't require any proprietary firmware at all (anymore). In particular Qualcomm Atheros liberated their major USB wireless chipsets about a decade ago and allowed further development to be taken on by the community. These adapters are a little bit on the older side, but for the purpose of your question that's a very good thing as far as support goes. Some are still mass manufactured and find their way into embedded devices of all sorts. In general any such libre wireless adapter has long been well-supported in principle. > Are there any USB Wi-Fi chipsets or models that are known to work well out of > the box with these older Debian versions? There is never a reason to intentionally use an older version of Debian. I think this is a misconception that new users often have when they're coming from a background of proprietary software, where every new version of an operating system increases system requirements even if just as an anti-competitive tactic to compel purchasing a new device. There are rare exceptions, but Debian is community-developed and never intentionally sabotages something that worked yesterday from working today. Radio transceivers do not have expiration dates and we will not impose them. A better way to think of it is new releases of Debian are intended to correct mistakes in older versions and keep up with the state-of-the-art in whatever people want to use their gizmos for. We don't make cheesy sequels here 🙂 So that said, the question pivots to "what chipsets or models are known to work well"? As I said, if a wireless adapter or chipset is able to work with exclusively free software or firmware, that's a very good hint that it should work smoothly—or at least if there are any problems, the shortcomings are more likely to be well-known and there's probably people around the globe trying to address the issue first. The Free Software Foundation has their Respects Your Freedom program which certifies products that are the state of the art with being respectful to users, and which are sold by (usually small) businesses that hone this craft. The three chipsets that are relevant in this discussion are AR9271, AR7010, and AR9170, all from Qualcomm Atheros. The AR9271 is the most well-known and widely available. The hardware is 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only with a single antenna, so it can get up to 150Mbps when using a 40MHz channel or 72Mbps with a 20MHz channel. Despite it being on the slightly lower end for speed, they're very widely manufactured and sold by many brands, were cost effective even at their inception, and outstandingly reliable. Specialty retailers often market them for information security work (e.g. "works with Kali") because other hardware may refuse access to features used more rarely. A single good antenna is also great for point-to-point links, mesh networks, IoT, and really a lot of applications. The AR7010 is technically superior: it's a USB chip that bridges a few different models of Qualcomm Atheros's Wi-Fi chips that would normally be used via PCI Express cards. The main appeal is to make a USB wireless adapter that's more powerful than the AR9271 for specialized applications; the AR7010 is often paired with a 5GHz-capable radio. The introduction of 5GHz Wi-Fi has been painful as far as regulatory and social issues go. For example, it's common that their use is legally prohibited outdoors at least on certain channels, and there may be limitations on use near airports or critical infrastructure. When use of some 5GHz channel is permitted for Wi-Fi, devices may need to be vigilant for signs of radar usage and abort if so. When everything works exactly as it's supposed to, the 5GHz band (and hence most of these AR7010 adapters) will be resilient and make real-time communications such as calling or streaming all the more buttery-smooth. So the problem? Even with the added versatility, the AR7010 didn't soar the same way AR9271 did, but did find use in some special applications. For example, some Sony Blu-ray players (I'm told) had an Ethernet port already, but the use of Sony's UWA-BR100 USB Wi-Fi adapter allowed fitting Wi-Fi on later. Likewise AR7010 was used in Microsoft's add-on wireless adapters for their Xbox 360 gaming consoles. I expect that these are very widely available second hand, but for some reason these adapters don't work with the normal driver/firmware combo that everything else uses. No one knows why. Researching this is on my to-do list and I have at least one to tinker with. I have a couple conjectures and I'm hopeful that a very super small code change will get these working with Linux, OpenBSD, and friends. Those first two chips are from a family nicknamed "ath9k-htc". They use kind of a weird processor—an Xtensa CPU with customized instructions specifically tailored for the Wi-Fi use case—but you could say The last mention is AR9170, also known by "carl9170" for the Linux driver/firmware combo it is used with. There are some hardware limitations that make it challenging to support 802.11n reliably, but dual-band versions are more commonly available and they're easier to hack on. These can be manually set to go at reduced speeds and in that case they should be more reliable. These have been overshadowed by ath9k_htc adapters and probably shouldn't be pursued for new purchases. PCI Express wireless cards are also readily available and might meet your needs better; I've limited this discussion to USB adapters only because you asked. I am the principal maintainer of the atk9k-htc and carl9170 firmware packages in Debian. If you need support as a user you are welcome to email or poke me directly. If you are in the United States I can also send you an adapter. Thanks, John P.S. In hindsight this email is overly verbose and detailed, perhaps intimidating, but it's good to have this detailed information in the list archives for future questions so I'm leaving it.
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