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I'm a competent programmer, but haven't done any serious linux programming. I've seen this question which looks like a great place to start, if only for interest. But my real question is that my laptop simply just has some driver issues with its wifi. Is there any value to even going down that path or would I need a contact with the hardware manufacturer to actually make a difference?

Is there another way I could make a positive contribution to fixing some wifi driver issues. The bug listing on launchpad never gets any serious attention so simply writing a bug report isn't going to help; I've done that, adding to the long list of people before me.

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  • I'd have thought the next step after writing bug reports, was to try and aid debugging them, ie. grabbing the required source code (assuming its an open-source driver) and following thru the code looking for the actual 'bug' yourself. If you find it, you can add your beliefs to the bug-report which I'd hope would gain attention pretty quickly (at minimum when you detect the code issue; you'll have a source file name, package name & can contact the maintainer )... This will help you learn more of the 'stack' etc if you want to take the next step of joining a project... (thought|idea only)
    – guiverc
    Dec 5, 2017 at 10:12
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    I went approximately this far trying to fix my mic input which also doesn't work. Got as far as finding the lines of code where the developers were flipping registers for similar chipsets (but not mine). But as far as I could tell it looked like all the developers were actual employees of the manufacturer. On that thread, the recommendation was to try setting certain registers to configure the input connections in alsa config, didn't work of course. I never got this far on the wifi front. Edit The git repository for the wifi was just a few precompiled files. that have since been integrated
    – jonathanbsyd
    Dec 5, 2017 at 10:30
  • The best way for non-programmers to help with driver development is to send hardware samples to people who develop(ed) drivers for similar hardware or in this case chipsets. Other than that, post a bounty on a platform like bountysource.com.
    – David Foerster
    Dec 8, 2017 at 0:45

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