Re: Proprietary WiFi drivers for live mode
Am Sonntag, 26. Juni 2022, 08:46:02 CEST schrieb Sven Joachim:
In your case I would suggest to build your own lifefile system with live-
build.
Thus you have the opportunity, to add any package you want to it and build in
your language, and you can also add packages not availabe in the debian repo.
If you get your Dell laptop running with some additionally package from the
debian repo, then you can add them in your own live-build.
The original debian livefile does sometimes not include, what you need.
You might (but this does not always work!), packages fro,m Ubuntu, which are
not available in debian. But take care of compabilties, Ubunto sometimes do
their own things and packages from Ubuntu might break debian.
I am doing all this, when building kali-linux live-system, which building is
almost the same as a debian-live system.
Give it a try, maybe it helps.
Best regards
Hans
> 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-firmw
> > are/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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