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USB Wi-Fi

FreedomBox works on many single board computers. However, many of these boards do not have built-in Wi-Fi capabilities. Even when Wi-Fi capability is available, non-free proprietary firmware is required to make them work.

A solution to the problem is to plug-in a USB Wi-Fi device into one of the available USB ports. There are many such devices available which do not require non-free firmware to work. The following is a list of such devices that work with FreedomBox devices. Some devices based on these chips have tested to work well with FreedomBox including functions such as access point mode.

• Devices with Atheros AR7010 chip

• Devices with Atheros AR9271 chip

Firmware Installation

The free firmware for these devices is not packaged in Debian yet. You can manually download and install the firmware as follows:

sudo su [enter password]
cd /lib/firmware
wget https://www.thinkpenguin.com/files/ath9k-htc/version-1.4-beta/htc_9271.fw
wget https://www.thinkpenguin.com/files/ath9k_firmware_free-version/htc_7010.fw

Resources

• Debian Wiki on WiFi drivers

• Wikipedia: Comparison of open-source Linux wireless network drivers

• WikiDevi: database of computer hardware

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