I recently purchased a new Dell XPS 17 9710 laptop. I have installed my 2021 version of slackware64-current, with a kernel version of 5.10.9. I thought everything was going well, but then started having hardware problems. So far, I can't get the networking card to work and there is no audio. I have a limited time to decide whether to return the laptop, so I can't take too long to track down these problems.

The laptop is equipped with an Intel Killer AX1650 NIC. When I check in dmesg, I see a stream of errors saying

where ## is a number that counts down from 128 to 0. Everything that I could find about this says that this NIC should be getting recognized as of kernel version 5.2. The only suggestion is backporting iwlwifi to an older kernel version.

Similarly, the audio card is Realtek ALC711-CG. The only things that I found were for non-Slackware Linux flavors, and they talked about recompiling the kernel.

If anyone has any experience in setting this laptop up using Slackware that will help with this, please let me know!

until you get a better reply....based on this reply to a similar firmware issue
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...6/#post6008234

I would suggest,,,,download a non-slackware distro examples can be found at distrowatch.com
I am not sure if you are averse to systemd or not distros that tend to include non-free firmware would be a good option.

I have not bothered to look at your sound device.

in the meantime you may like to post your specs for those devices and research them

only post the snippets for your sound and network device please

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion. Are you recommending switching from slackware to a different distribution, or just use a non-slackware package to address the problem? If the former, is there something about the slackware-current tree that keeps it from resolving this problem?

Again, I'm not sure that I understand your suggestion. I've been researching them. Do you mean post the snippets so that others can post suggestions as well?

Sorry for the questions. Just not quite sure I understand where you think I should go with this.

Dan

If you have a bleeding edge laptop, why are you not using 5.15.4 kernel?

A couple of reasons. First, I didn't expect this to be a bleeding edge laptop. Second, I require stability more than bleeding edge, so I typically only do major upgrades (which includes kernel upgrades) a couple of times a year. I am about to do one of these upgrades. Do you know if the 5.15.4 kernel resolves this problem? Given that the issue with the Killer NIC were reportedly resolved back with the 5.2 kernel, I was surprised to run into this at 5.10!

I don't know whether it is resolved in 5.15.x, but relative to linux development , your laptop is very new hardware. You do know it is trivial to install both 5.10.x & 5.15.x simultaneously and switch back and forth for testing to see which works best for you?

After doing some more research I found that the AX 1650 just isn't supported. I returned the Dell laptop as a result. I purchased a Razer laptop with the AX 210 chip. As far as I could tell prior to purchasing this laptop, all of the hardware is supported by Linux. However, I'm still not getting onto the network with the AX 210 chip. When I run ifconfig I get the following output:

However, when I check dmesg, I don't find anything

The iwlwifi module is loaded

and the correct firmware (according to Intel), iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-59.ucode, is is the /lib/firmware directory. I'm still trying to research options but would also appreciate ideas.

P.S. Since this no longer applies to the Dell laptop, please let me know if I should close this thread and start a new one.

I upgraded to the latest version of Slackware-current and installed it. Now I am getting on the network with the laptop. Thank you all for the help. I will mark this thread as solved