Re: Proprietary WiFi drivers for live mode
On Sun 26 Jun 2022 at 09:07:11 (+0200), Hans wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 26. Juni 2022, 08:46:02 CEST schrieb Sven Joachim:
> > 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.
> >
> > 1. https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/firmware-b43-installer
>
> 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.
Sorry, but I can't see the attraction of a live system, as opposed to
just building the Debian system on a stick. Care to explain?
Cheers,
David.
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