I recently purchased a Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16IAX10H and have installed Fedora 43 running KDE. Fedora KDE has been working well overall with the exception of wifi.
The device has a MEDIATEK Corp. MT7925 802.11be 160MHz 2x2 PCIe Wireless Network Adapter [Filogic 360] (according to lspci). I cannot get this device working on Fedora 43 with kernel 6.19.12,
Interestingly, I downloaded the KDE livecd and the wifi device is identified and connects to my network. The version number of the mt7xxx firmware used by the KDE livecd was 20251021-1, and the current version installed is 20260309-1.
I’ve talking about this device associated with bluetooth and/or rfkill but bluetooth is happily working and has been from day 1, and rfkill has previously shown that the device was block but no longer does.
D TYPE DEVICE SOFT HARD
0 wlan ideapad_wlan unblocked unblocked
1 bluetooth ideapad_bluetooth unblocked unblocked
2 bluetooth hci0 unblocked unblocked
3 wlan phy0 unblocked unblocked
I’m thinking that it must be firmware related but I’m not quite sure how to proceed from here and any help/guidance will be most appreciated.
What happens if you select an older kernel version from the GRUB menu when booting? This combination (latest firmware + older kernel) might help to narrow down whether it’s a kernel issue or a firmware issue.
If wifi is enabled in UEFI/BIOS it will get different firmware. You may need a vendor firmware update, or disabling WiFi in BIOS may force use of the current linux firmware. I have found it necessary to have a USB WiFi dongle while waiting for a fix to onboard WiFi.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try but I’m pretty sure wifi was activated in bios when I was playing with the KDE livecd. It can’t hurt to try though …
I tried disabling wifi in the bios and the kernel doesn’t even recognise it’s there and load the driver. I suspected this might be the case but it’s good to confirm. Thanks again for the suggestion.
How did you check for the wifi device: lspc, rfkill? Is linux the only OS installed on the system? Does the user manual mention ways to toggle airplane mode?
Yes Linux is the only OS installed - no M$ viruses on my machines.
I used lspci to confirm that the device was not available.
Airplane more is turned on/off via function key. I didn’t think to test whether airplane mode or rfkill would have any impact on the machine seeing as the device wasn’t even recognised by the kernel. I will try again and check if they make a difference but I doubt they will.
Check rfkill as well. In BIOS there should be settings to enable wake on wireless which only listens so doesn’t need the full firmware stack with regulatory domain logic, transmitter, etc.
Have you checked for vendor firmware updates? Sometimes BIOS needs updating to work with newer WiFi firmware.
Thank you to those who responded. I appear to have resolved the problem and the solution was fairly simple once I started to investigate it further.
I mentioned at the start that I used the Fedora 43 KDE livecd to test the system prior to installing Fedora on the machine. What I neglected to mention was that I installed from the Fedora Workstation image and somehow I didn’t install wifi support for NetworkManager and it wasn’t immediately obvious.
The questions from George sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole and then I noticed the following in the output from journalctl
A Google search indicated that the NetworkManager-wifi plugin was needed but not installed on my machine (NFI why it wasn’t installed in the first place but I probably missed something). After installing the package and restarting NetworkManager I was able to connect to my wireless network.
Thanks George for triggering a thought process that led to deeper investigation.
If WiFi was disabled (either for power saving or “airplane” mode) when you installed Fedora, I wouldn’t expect the installer to include support for WiFi.