Re: Proprietary WiFi drivers for live mode
On 2022-06-25 18:11 +0300, Kristijonas Lukas Bukauskas wrote:
> I have an old Dell laptop with Broadcom BCM43142 WiFi device
> (https://wiki.debian.org/wl). It doesn't have a hard drive, so I
> sometimes boot Debian from USB Memory Stick in live mode.
> The problem is that WiFi doesn't work because of the proprietary drivers
> it needs.
Probably you do not need proprietary drivers for your card, but it
requires non-free firmware. Which on these old Broadcom devices is a
PITA, because Broadcom did not make it easily available.
> I tried booting it from live+nonfree image
> (https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/11.3.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/),
> but still no luck (WiFi doesn't work). As I understand, the needed
> drivers would load when installing the system, but they do not load in
> live mode.
There is a misunderstanding here. Debian's non-free images do not
contain proprietary drivers, but they provide firmware for the devices,
so that the in-kernel drivers can actually work.
If the non-free image does not work, the firmware for your device is
missing because of licensing reasons. There is a package named
firmware-b43-installer in contrib which downloads Broadcom's old drivers
and extracts the firmware from them. Obviously you need a network
connection for that, so you might have to use it on another system.
Good luck,
Sven
1. https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/firmware-b43-installer
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