Acer Aspire laptop with QCA9377 wifi AKA Qualcomm Atheros Device 0042 (rev 30)

[TrevorB]

Good day,

My laptop:
Acer Aspire E15 E5-552G-T6LP

Distro:
Manjaro Cinnamon 16.02
kernel: 4.18

I'm relaying these instructions so others may not go through the pain I did in getting my wifi working. Although, to be honest, it was a great learning experience.

I ran into troubles installing Manjaro on my Acer Aspire laptop which is less than a year old--there was no wifi, and though Manjaro was detecting the hardware, it didn't know what to do with it. Running this command:
$ lspci
returned many results, one of which was this:
02.00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros Device 0042 (rev 30)

Much searching indicated I had a driver/module problem, and I needed the ath10k module for my wifi to work. Google indicated others were having my problem and while there were some instructive posts on an Ubuntu forum, this post put it all together for me: http://boggs.xyz/2016/01/06/qca9377-linux/

I'll paraphrase the boggs.xyz post:

First, download the necessary files:

backports-20151120 found here:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/backports/2015/11/20/backports-20151120.tar.xz

Commit 7d14e337ad25c0ef3e78fc47eac336697ca612e8 of kvalo/ath10k-firmware. Download ZIP from here:
https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/archive/7d14e337ad25c0ef3e78fc47eac336697ca612e8.zip

Also, make sure you have the dependencies installed.

# pacman -S base-devel linux-headers git

When you run this command you'll be prompted to specify your kernel. I chose 4.1 because I'm using kernel version 4.18. --Trevor

or

# apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) git

or your distro's equivalent.

Next, extract backports, and run the following inside the resulting directory.

$ make defconfig-ath10k
$ make
# make install

Finally, inside the ath10k-firmware repository, run the following as root.

# cp -r ath10k/ /lib/firmware/
# cp -r QCA9377 /lib/firmware/ath10k/
# mv /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-5.bin

After rebooting, you should be able to detect and connect to wireless networks.
End paraphrase.

With many thanks to boggs.xyz, I rebooted my laptop and the wifi was there!

p.s. Dear moderator, please let me know if I haven't put this in the appropriate place, or if I've breached etiquette on some way (if so, I apologize).

[c00ter]

Nice post--glad you gotcher wifi.

I assume you tried the package in the AUR--"firmware_ath10k-qca6174"? I dunno if it works with your device or not...

Regards

[TrevorB]

Hi,

That package was "flagged out of date 15-12-29," so I was scared to try it because I'm a newb.

This link may also be useful for others seeking a solution for Arch-based distros: https://github.com/ajaybhatia/Qualcomm-Atheros-QCA9377-Wifi-Linux/

[Citroen]

My new Dell laptop will arrive today and has a Qualcomm wifi card (QCA9565 / AR9565)
I wonder if I'll get this baby going, since the machine doesn't have a LAN port... 

[eronis55]

Thanks, it worked