What to do with some Intel Celeron laptops at work?
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I work at a tutoring center and we have some laptops available for the students to work on homework, do practice problems, and take tests, as well as for the tutors to look up information and print out documents.
Currently all of our laptops run Windows 10, but at one point we bought some newer Windows 11 laptops. We stopped using them because they were so slow. Sometimes opening just the newtab page in Edge would take over a minute. We have not yet tried to objectively measure the slowness, but it definitely feels slower than the older Windows 10 laptops. It was already too late to return them by the time we decided we would have wanted to. Since our older Windows 10 laptops were still working fine, we continued to use those, even though it meant we occasionally had situations where all the laptops were in use.
I suggested a different operating system might run better, and I was authorized to install one. I started by testing Trisquel, since that's the operating system I use on my laptop. I had to disable secure boot to get it to run, and somewhat to my surprise, it appeared to boot! Unfortunately Wi-Fi doesn't seem to work, which I did expect, but I'm not sure how best to proceed from here. I can't think of a convincing reason for the company to buy Wi-Fi adapters, unless all available software for the device (including nonfree software) has significant bugs (which *may* be the case; the Wi-Fi was flakey on Windows and something I read online called the device "infamous").
I don't really want to install nonfree software, but it also doesn't seem like it should really matter to me whether the resulting system has nonfree software - they are not my devices. Probably everyone who uses the device will not own the device, because we bought them primarily for the students to use.
If there's no free software available, then maybe I'd like to somehow make the Windows driver or firmware that's already installed run instead of downloading new nonfree software or buying new hardware, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
There's also this error which seems pretty concerning, but I don't know what it means:
```
[ 1.362359] i915 0000:00:02.0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
[ 1.362364] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Failed to load DMC firmware. Disabling runtime power management.
```
The laptops are Asus L210M laptops.
I'm curious to get others thoughts on this situation. I suppose I will have to ask elsewhere if I want to hear from people who will recommend nonfree software in any case, but maybe there are other options that don't involve nonfree software that I'm not aware of?
Is using Ethernet a viable option? It should work out of the box.
No, there are no ethernet ports on the devices, and no ethernet ports in the walls (afaik), and the way tables are arranged now would make it difficult for most students to sit near the wall.
"it also doesn't seem like it should really matter to me whether the resulting system has nonfree software"
That's like a company saying it's not responsible for the toxic waste it knowingly dumped in someone's garden, deflecting any responsibility because the garden belongs to someone else. It does matter if you're the cause that it's there. By installing nonfree software, you become complicit.
"Probably everyone who uses the device will not own the device"
But someone does, and that someone deserves software freedom - And there's no harm if the people using the computers get it too (i.e. making copies of Trisquel, etc.) Compatible WiFi hardware can be found for US$5 - such a low cost that it's simpler to purchase the hardware than to engage with the moral outsourcing and shifting of responsibilities that seem to be going on.
Been meaning to mention, the company might object to significant changes to their computers. I do understand your thinking though.
Sometimes things aren't as simple as we wish them to be.
Idealism is tricky to implement some places.
Although we definitely should try when feasible.
"Compatible WiFi hardware can be found for US$5"
Really? Please tell me where I can find wireless adapters for that price!
I had thought the price would have been several times that, but if it's that cheap then I'll buy a dozen myself and that will be enough for all of these computers (4) plus some computers I want wireless support on (3+), and I would probably have enough extra to give one to everyone else who has ever complained about this problem to me in person (1 or 2), as well as others in the future.
Search "AR9271" on a site such as ebay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=AR9271&_sop=15
Yes, and another chipset for USB is AR9170 which is supported by the free carl9170 firmware:
https://github.com/chunkeey/carl9170fw
AliExpress is another place:
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-AR9271.html?g=y&SearchText=AR9271&sortType=price_asc
A downside is those smaller thumb-sized USB WiFi have smaller antennas, as to to fit inside that tiny case, and thus have a smaller range. Maybe a smaller range is a problem for you and maybe it's not. There are also AR9271 that are bigger with larger built-in antenna and even some that have an external antenna.
But all of that means not using the antenna that (we can assume) is already built-in to those computers, and is probably hidden behind the display as a large loop. To access that, the use of an internal WiFi card is needed.
If you want Mini PCI Express cards to go inside computers, these are the chipsets to look for that are supported by the ath5k and ath9k kernel modules without blobs.
https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers/ath9k.html
And then matching up with single band or dual band and the 2 or 3 antenna connectors as indicated, depending on how many those computers already have. (Probably need to open it and look inside to see if the existing WiFi card has 2 or 3 antenna connectors plugged in to it.)
https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers/ath5k.html
But that also means opening the computer to replace the WiFi card which maybe you don't want to do. USB is surely easier in that regard.
Thank you for all of this information!
The furthest away point from the router seems to be about 60 ft away with about 3 walls in between. Does anyone know how to estimate how far the range will be with different specific adapters?
Wi-Fi range depends on many factors so the best way is to try different setups and test. There are programs you can use on a laptop to test signal strength (in dBm) while walking around.
And if the coverage isn't good enough you can always connect multiple access points together; that's what I did when I found that the WiFi coverage wasn't too good on the far side of my house. I have several WiFi routers (running libreCMC). They're connected together via ethernet as the backhaul connection so they can easily talk with each other, and each broadcasts the WiFi signal forming a single network throughout the house.
Would you happen to know of a way to make purchases on AliExpress without running its nonfree software? I think I want to buy from there regardless of whether my work ends up buying some.
This one is a good one if you need something cheap that you know for a fact works.
I have a few, they work pretty decently. Their build isn't exactly too stable physically but they are so damn cheap.
Putting these links that I found here for future reference:
https://wiki.parabola.nu/WiFi_devices_known_to_work_with_Parabola_GNU/Linux-libre
https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:project:faq#why_has_my_wi-fi_card_stopped_working
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Hardware-Considerations.html
These pages have some information on other available hardware. The FCC ID seems like a pretty useful way to track this; I plan to update the Parabola wiki if I get one of those devices.
I found some information about what "runtime power management" is. Runtime power management seems to be the enabling and disabling of devices inside another device to save power, for example disabling a Wi-Fi card when it is not in use. Based on running `cat /sys/bus/*/devices/*/power/runtime_enabled` I think that runtime power management is only disabled for some devices (296 out of 341 in my case, versus 292 out of 327 disabled on my personal laptop, which does not have the error listed in my first post). I think the main consequence of this is that the device will use more battery than it otherwise would.
Here's some links with more info:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Runtime_Power_Management
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/i915.html
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/runtime_pm.html