X61 Wifi/BT upgrade

[Dekks]

I have a X61 T8100 unit that uses a intel 4965AGN wifi card without Bluetooth setup with a Korean kb/ibus on Arch Linux. I ran pacman -Syyu prior to disassembly so arch was up-to date.

The palm rest as expected gets rather warm and i was fed up of the USB BT 4.0 catching on things and ending up at the bottom of the bag.

So i found a Azurewave AW-AB116H wifi/BT half-length dual band miniPCIe card on ebay for a tenner + a half length adapter [£2] from ebay and filched an old roll of 10mm polyamide tesa tape from work. The AW card is based on the AR5B22 chipset which needs the ath9k driver in linux & the latest firmware file.

The X61 has already been Middleton'ed but i burned a DVD just in case, taking the kb off and the kb bezel off was easy enough but as usual the old card was screwed in very tight & i get worried about the amount of force i have use on these old motherboards to get the [censored] screws out. That done it was time to tape pin51. The whole point of this is to bypass the whitelisting of the BT module, it involves masking the disable pin so the machine can activate the BT module, you can tape as i do or use a needle to dope the pin with isocyanate glue. The existing card has 3 cables L to R grey white black, for the AW i taped the white out of the way to the MB & connected grey to LH connector and black to RH.

After 6 attempts i finally worked out a way of getting the tape to stay in place while inserting the card in the normal but while the wi-fi worked out of the box with the latest arch 4 series kernel the BT resolutely failed to play ball in the normal wi-fi slot. So i enabled the WWAN slot in BIOS and the BT sprang to life on the first go. Not sure if it was a masking issue or if there is a difference in the 2 slots but i'll take the working BT, after all the time fiddling with little bits of tape i didn't fancy taking it apart to see.

The wifi shows up as AR9462 in lspci and the BT as AR3012[PCI ID - 0489:e04e FOXCONN/Hui] under lsusb. The wifi LED doesn't work but that is to be expected from what i've googled before. On reassembly the machine rebooted with both modules being detected straight away, blueman-applet detects the BT under adapters and it connected to my FSL/360 headphones using the A2DP profile upon discovery/setup first time. I've tested it for 40 mins and no dropouts at all even going 20/30 feet into the kitchen.

The only issue with the whole install is a missing descriptor error[-22] in the journal from the BT module on startup. It doesn't seem to be an issue atm and googling shows the same error on other atheros chips. I'll start digging more on that tomorrow.

[axur-delmeria]

The X61's WLAN slot doesn't have USB signals, that's why the Bluetooth part of your card didn't work.

Only the WWAN slot has both PCIe and USB signals wired in, because it has to support both the Intel Turbo Memory card (which is a PCIe device) and the WWAN card (USB device).

[Dekks]

The X61's WLAN slot doesn't have USB signals, that's why the Bluetooth part of your card didn't work.

Only the WWAN slot has both PCIe and USB signals wired in, because it has to support both the Intel Turbo Memory card (which is a PCIe device) and the WWAN card (USB device).

Nice to see that confirmed although i wasn't too surprised with the first attempts at taping off the pin. Certainly runs cooler than the intel card.