This community will not support the installation of proprietary
firmware-blobs.
Though the T500 has a slot that is MiniPCIe in form factor, it has been
crippled to only accept devices with PCI-ID's contained in a BIOS whitelist.
The cards sold which are white listed come with an additional requirement
that they must carry the Lenovo brand name and consequently cost twice as
much. If an unauthorized card is plugged in it gives a 1802 error on initial
boot up before it even touches the operating system. It'll report
"unauthorized MiniPCI network card".
While these companies claim the systems are restricted to these cards because
the FCC requires it the reality is it is due to profit. Many companies don't
white list and the FCC has stated that there is no such requirement. There
story then changed to being other nations have such restrictions. In any case
this is just an excuse to make more money. It is highly profitable.
The solution is to not buy from such companies. Toshiba, Dell, HP, and
Lenovo/IBM are on the bad guy list.
Now that said there are a few less desirable options for working around such
problems. These systems can still be used with USB wifi cards.
Unfortunately its not that simple to pick up a wifi card or any device
because model numbers don't equate to chipsets and its the chipsets that
matter which driver is used. As an example: While a Linksys wifi card (say
model LNS-230WIFI) had an Atheros AR9273 that was compatible with GNU/Linux
at one time the same model doesn't use this chipset today. Today it uses a
RTL8293 and that chipset is not compatible with GNU/Linux or free software
operating systems. Unfortunately because of this many users end up purchasing
this card thinking it will work only to find that they have been led astray.
Now there are a few chipsets that will work and you can attempt to locate
cards by chipset. It's not perfect either unfortunately. Chipsets also have
different IDs and if the ID is not in the driver it won't work either or it
may work with a future version of the OS.
There is one-four USB wifi chipset that will work out of the box with
Trisquel 6 that use certain IDs. The first three are USB G chipsets:
RTL8187B/RTL8187L/RTL8187 and the 2nd one is an older generation USB N
chipset AR9170. There is a third that will also work provided you install the
firmware and apply all OS updates. This is the AR9271/AR7010. I can't say all
devices will work which have this chipset although many will.
I'm the founder & CEO of ThinkPenguin and the company is focused on free
software. There are two models we sell at the moment and will probably have a
third out in the future with these chipsets.
The USB G Wireless Adapter uses the RTL8187B: works great & out of the box in
all recent Trisquel releases
Then there is the USB N adapter which is using the AR9271 chipset:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/TPE-N150USB
Works with OS update and installation of free firmware.
The third is also dependent on the OS update and the install of free
firmware:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/TPE-N150USBL
The two USB N adapters above are certified by the Free Software Foundation
and will have excellent support for all free distributions going forward.
Most other distributions work out of the box with them already.
