Change internal Wifi to USB dongle

Network WiFi
1

I have been running ipFire for several years now and love it.

My device has an old Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless PCIe adapter that I’m wanting to upgrade. I have decided to try a USB dongle in the hope of simplifying the changeover.

Has anyone done this? Do I just plug the dongle in and re-run the setup from the console? If I do that, do I get to keep my existing Blue network setup or do I have to recreate that from scratch? If the latter, is there any way of exporting and then importing the current configuration?

TIA,

Rob

2

Hello,

you plug in the module, run setup to assign it to the BLUE interface in your case, then go to the Wireless AP page on the web UI and adjust any settings again. Done.

3

Thanks for your reply @Michael. Unfortunately I’ve fallen at the first hurdle. When I run setup, the only device I have to choose from is my internal PCIe WiFi adapter.

In cat /var/log/messages | grep usb I see this:

Apr 14 16:55:42 skye-bridge usb_modeswitch: switch device 0bda:1a2b on 003/003
Apr 14 16:55:42 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: USB disconnect, device number 3
Apr 14 16:55:42 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: new high-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
Apr 14 16:55:43 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=35bc, idProduct=0101, bcdDevice= 0.00
Apr 14 16:55:43 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Apr 14 16:55:43 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: Product: 802.11ax WLAN Adapter
Apr 14 16:55:43 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: Manufacturer: Realtek
Apr 14 16:55:43 skye-bridge kernel: usb 3-2: SerialNumber: 00e04c000001
Apr 14 16:55:43 skye-bridge root: usb_modeswitch: switched to 35bc:0101 on 003/004

So it appears the dongle is being seen and recognised as a WiFi device.

lsusb gives:

...
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 35bc:0101 Realtek 802.11ax WLAN Adapter
...

so far so good.

However, lspci | grep Network only shows my LAN adapters and internal WiFi adapter:

01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
04:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

And, as expected I guess, iwconfig also doesn’t see it:

lo        no wireless extensions.

red0      no wireless extensions.

green0    no wireless extensions.

orange0   no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  Mode:Master  Tx-Power=21 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off

Search engine results suggest installing drivers via apt install… but I’m a bit wary of doing that on an ipFire device.

Any suggestions about the way ahead most welcome!

4

Hi Rob,

This device should be supported from Linux 6.19, but IPFire is based on Linux 6.18 LTS. Therefore there is no driver available (yet) and there is no way to install this manually.

5

Do you know how long it might be before ipFire updates to Linux 6.19 or higher?

6

IPFire runs on the LTS versions. Currently that is the 6.18 branch.

The 6.19 branch reached EOL a couple of weeks ago.

There is no fixed version umber or timing for when the next LTS version will be but typicallly, looking at the previous ones, they occur around a year after the last LTS release. 6.18 became LTS in Nov 2025 so I would suggest that the next LTS version will most likely be around the end of this year.