Intel ARK Page - AX200
Intel ARK Page - AX201
I recently moved to a place where it's inconvenient to do a hard-wired ethernet connection for my dual-boot tower PC. After some months using a leftover USB wireless-N adapter limited to 2.4GHz, typically topping out at 2MB/s in spite of a proclaimed 150Mbps (18.75MB/s) on the thing itself, I was ready for a more permanent upgrade. Brief research seemed to show that the AX200 series cards were possibly supported in Linux, so I took a chance, and picked up a version packaged for PCIe connection. Naturally, it works fine in Windows with drivers from Intel. Great speeds—only limited by my ISP plan level and 802.11ac router.
But it turns out, the WiFi does not work out-of-the-box in Linux Mint 19.1. It shows up in lspci, but not dmesg. [Note: 2723 is AX200 specific]
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user@Mint:~$ lspci | grep 2723
09:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 2723 (rev 1a)---
More research on how to get the AX200 working in Linux revealed the following:
AX200 uses the iwlwifi driver and requires Linux kernel version 5.1+ but can be enabled on systems with older kernels by building and installing the backported driver.*AX201 requires kernel version 5.2+
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My current plan is to just wait it out until Mint has an option for 5.1 kernels in Update Manager. Maybe that will happen with Mint 19.2. I can afford to be patient because the card works in Windows for any big downloads, otherwise the USB adapter is left connected for Mint.
When the day comes, I've got the firmware files already in place for iwlwifi to pick up...
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user@Mint:~$ ls /lib/firmware | grep iwlwifi-cc-a0
iwlwifi-cc-a0-46.ucode
iwlwifi-cc-a0-48.ucode
