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I am considering getting a second-hand HP 840 G1, on which I intend to run Linux (Ubuntu MATE specifically). After reading up on other people’s experience, it seems the major issue is the wifi adapter, which requires a proprietary firmware blob to work.

My idea therefore was to replace the wifi adapter with something that’s fully supported, no proprietary blobs required.

According to the information on ifixit, the wifi adapter is just plugged into the motherboard and should be really easy to replace.

However, I know previous HP models (the EliteBook 6930p being one I know of) had some check in their BIOS that would prevent them from booting if a non-stock component (such as a third-party WWAN card) was present in the system.

Does anyone know if the 840 G1 has similar checks in place? Has someone by chance successfully swapped out their wifi adapter for a different model?

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  • Wifi adapters are hard coded into the bios, if the wifi adapter model is not in the bios firmware it will not work, no way around this unless you can hack the bios firmware.
    – Moab
    Commented Jun 24, 2017 at 0:44
  • @Moab any source to back that up? PCIe is a generic interface, and BIOSes generally don’t have any particular support for peripherals, as this is handled by the OS—unless the device needs to perform some kind of function before the OS is loaded (and in this case BIOS support is often just a standardized subset of functionality, e.g. for display adapters). The issue with the 6930p is that the BIOS maintains a whitelist of devices and will refuse to boot if a component is found that is not on the list. Hacked BIOSes for the 6930p exist, which remove the constraint by simply removing the check.
    – user149408
    Commented Jul 28, 2017 at 13:14

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I decided to just run the risk, got the 840 and booted into Ubuntu MATE from a live USB drive, and the adapter got recognized. I then simply moved the hard disk from my old 6930p into the 840, and wifi works—all I had to do was re-enter the wifi password. (I also tried a 12.04 live USB, which didn’t recognize the wifi adapter.)

Not sure if there are any binary blobs involved, but the gist is that Ubuntu 16.04 supports the adapter out of the box (though older versions may not), hence swapping out the adapter turned out not to be necessary.

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