So I bought another Lenovo Thinkpad laptop recently. (I like them, they work well with Linux, they're solidly built.)
After having some minor annoyances with the Broadcom wireless in my previous thinkpad, this time I ordered one with an Intel wireless chip that'd be well supported in Linux. However once the laptop arrived, I discovered that the Intel option doesn't support the 5GHz band, which I really need at home. (There's some kind of ridiculous non-802.11 interference on the 2.4GHz band) Oh well I thought, I'll just pop a different mini-PCIe card into the laptop. I popped the one out of my old thinkpad and put it into the new one.. Which then promptly refused to boot with "Error 1802 - Unauthorised wireless card detected" *sigh* You'd think a card from one Thinkpad would be authorised to work in another, but apparently not :/ The detection is done via the PCI ID. So anyway.. I found some rumours online about being able to switch the PCI IDs of the Intel wifi cards from within Linux, permanently. (I guess it's adjusting the EEPROM somehow) (If I can switch the ID of the new card to the old one, then I'll also need to recompile the Linux driver to recognise it, but that's easy enough) I don't suppose anyone here has had to do this for their own Thinkpad (or HP) laptops, and if so, has any pointers? Thanks, Toby PS. It used to be the case that modified BIOSes existed that removed the stupid whitelist, or changed it, but with the advent of secure boot and Windows 8, it seems the BIOSs are cryptographically signed and so this is harder to achieve. _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
