Wifi Card Doesn't Turn on on Dell Latitude 7490

frogprince

Because of the trouble I was having with the touchpad on my E6420, I picked up a 7490 from eBay for a decent price. When I boot it to Ghost from a USB drive, the touchpad is much better, but the wifi won't turn on. Clicking on Network Manager on the tool bar gets a message to Restart Connection Manager; but clicking on it does nothing, and I'm given no other choices, so Connection Manager isn't connecting. Running ifconfig doesn't show any network adapters. The machine came with Win 11 Pro, and the wifi works on that, so the card is good. It also tells me that the wifi adapter is a QualcommQCA61x4A 802.11 ac. Is there a way to install a driver for this machine? Thanks in advance.

RodMyers

check the bios. "should" be turned on

also throw a live linux distro to check. limuc mint would suffice.

I have a 7440, and it just works

frogprince

Rod, thanks for replying. I checked the BIOS, and wlan is turned on in two places. I then booted the machine from MX Linux 25 XFCE, and the wifi worked flawlessly, the card was immediately turned on and I was offered a selection of SSID's to select from. Chose my own and entered the password, and everything worked. I found
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/hardware/#wlan
which lists all the current wifi systems supported in FreeBSD 15.0, and this particular card is nowhere to be found. So I think I'm just out of luck until the Atheros drivers get caught up. I like this laptop a lot; it's lightweight, has a good display, an i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB NVMe drive. I was trying to buy one of your unit models, and I guess I picked the wrong model number in error. Right now, I own six Dell and LeNovo laptops, and the only wifi that works on FreeBSD is the Dell 6420. My plan is to communicate with the laptop project and see if I can learn when an updated driver might be available.

nevillehay

frogprince what do you have in
/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf?

frogprince

So, from a response from the FreeBSD forum:
"That Intel AX210 certainly is supported, the Qualcomm QCA61x4A isn't. Don't know why yours has a different Wifi chipset, maybe Dell switched to a different supplier, or used whatever was in stock at the time."
So I'm off to find a different wifi card to install.

frogprince

Neville: thanks for responding! I only ran Ghost from a USB drive, and can find no /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file. I did receive the replacement wifi card, and intend to install it this afternoon and see what happens.