Using wrong wifi card

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1

Hey! I loved using Fedora Linux for awhile, but I always had issues with the wifi. It would randomly cut out completely on me, take 5 minutes to connect on boot, etc.
My computer has an onboard wifi card that used to work, but kinda died on me and became crap and very inconsistent while I was still only a Windows user. I bought a new one: https://a.co/d/fbErBB3

This seemed to be similar behavior, so I am now thinking Linux is attempting to use my old wifi card.

I reinstalled my Fedora a couple months back because I was kinda just playing around with it and wanted to redo it to clean it up. I ran into a wifi issue strangely enough. (Can’t remember the error, can’t reproduce it right now, it’s not an issue at the moment), so I kinda just gave up since no one online would give me any guidance.

I was recently in my bios and found that the only wifi card was still enabled. Disabled it. Wifi still worked normally on windows with my new wifi card. Thinking this could have been the issue, I am trying Fedora again, but it doesn’t seem to use the new card at all. The kernel sees the new card, but doesn’t use it.

I don’t have another wifi card on hand at the moment, though I might be able to get one for temporary testing if needed.

Any assistance? Thanks!

2

Not without details.

Excepting thin and light laptops, wifi cards are often removable (due to low reliability, regulatory differences across countries, and frequent technology changes). You should provide the details (Vendor and model) of the system and both the original and add-on wifi cards:

  • whether Windows fastboot is enabled
  • vendor and model
  • Fedora version after applying all updates (asking for help without updating is rarely useful as many more issues are fixed than created by updates, and the community benefits when issues
    caused by an update are reported).
  • linux drivers used with each card (if the driver is not provided by Fedora, details of how it was intalled)
  • do you get the issues with both cold and warm boot?

You may find it helpful to check Linux Hardware using the above details to see what experiences other linux users have had. Wifi support is generally consistent
across distros with the same first two digits of the kernel version.

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