Hi. On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 12:25:10PM -0500, Steven Mainor wrote: > I have a laptop with a QCA9377 Atheros AC wifi card. When I install > debian 10.7 amd64 I get a warning about missing non-free firmware and > the wifi doesn't work. It was my understanding that ath10k was open > source and included in linux. Is this not the case?
The driver is free software. The firmware it requires is not. Thank US FCC for that - [1]. > If not is there any wireless AC card that doesn't require binary > drivers? To the best of my knowledge - there are none. Again, [1]. > And barring that, what is the best wifi(N?) card I can buy > that doesn't require closed source drivers/firmware? Anything that's ath9k supports does not require any firmware at all. Ath9k is limited to 802.1n though. See [2] for an example list. Reco [1] https://hackaday.com/2016/02/26/fcc-locks-down-router-firmware [2] https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/ath9k/products/external
