Idea Pad Yoga With Wlan

08 May 2013

I bought a new Lenovo Ideapad Yoga laptop and the first thing I did was installing Fedora. Fedora works nice on it, touch screen works out of the box \o/, though the card reader doesn't work but I don't use it, so it's ok for me. But a big problem is that there is no RJ45 Ethernet plug, only W-LAN and this doesn't work out of box. So I search and found some creepy sources for it but they all fail to compile so I wrote the author of these drivers and he told me that it's on Github. Conclusion: I'm too stupid for google.

If you take the source from Github it compiles fine on my laptop. So start with cloning the repo doing:

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723au.git

And compile and install it with:

make && sudo make install

After a restart you should have W-LAN. You need to do this step every time you update your kernel! You may need one of these packages to compile if you don't have them already.

make gcc kernel-header kernel-devel patch

Driver quality

The drivers are really stable and I have no problems, no connection losses. And I tested the speed with netio and it's a bit slower than the windows drivers but I think most people, including me, can live with that. In the table you can see the speed differences between the Linux and windows drivers.

packet size	Fedora 18 (TCP)	Windows 8 (TCP)	Fedora 18 (UDP)	Windows 8 (UDP)
Receiving from client, packet size 1k	6919.15 KByte/s	7439.19 KByte/s	7834.33 KByte/s	8996.88 KByte/s
Sending to client, packet size 1k	4100.83 KByte/s	6174.82 KByte/s	11.19 MByte/s	11.20 MByte/s
Receiving from client, packet size 16k	7644.62 KByte/s	8564.73 KByte/s	8770.21 KByte/s	9020.33 KByte/s
Sending to client, packet size 16k	4455.27 KByte/s	7974.70 KByte/s	11.32 MByte/s	11.42 MByte/s
Receiving from client, packet size 32k	7878.99 KByte/s	8494.75 KByte/s	10.15 MByte/s	10.94 MByte/s
Sending to client, packet size 32k	3990.65 KByte/s	8145.11 KByte/s	11.44 MByte/s	11.46 MByte/s