Kubuntu 22.04 on Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G3 ACL

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G3 ACL is a well equipped device with a Ryzen 7 CPU and decent built-quality. The keyboard has a backlight feature, but not the quality and key drop a typical ThinkPad keyboard has – and the typical ThinkPad Trackpoint is missing 🙁 Installing Linux (Kubuntu 22.04, Kernel 5.15) works well if there would not be the Realtek RTL8852BE WiFi with integrated Bluetooth.

Realtek Hardware and Linux can be a real pain in the ass – since decades new Realtek Chips and recent Linux Distributions don’t fit together :-/

You will find many manuals on how to get the RTL8852BE running on recent distributions, the following Linux driver for RTW8852BE based on the GitRepo “lwfinger” (https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw8852be) works well on *buntu 22.04 LTS (Kernel: 5.15) – Wifi and Bluetooth.

Disable Secure Boot/UEFI – informations on installing the Kernel module with enabled UEFI/Secure Boot is available on https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw8852be

Requirements for building and installing the Kernel modules:

sudo apt-get install make gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential git

How to install RTL8852BE WiFi

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw8852be.git
cd rtw8852be/
make
sudo make install

After a reboot the RTL8852BE WiFi should work. A quick look with “lspci -v” will report the usage of “rtl8852be” Kernel driver in use.

How to install Bluetooth

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89-BT.git
cd rtw89-BT/
make
sudo make install