FIXED thanks all, installed Ubuntu which fixed it. Much obliged to all comments :-)
——————————————————
I may give it up, but just playing with an old laptop and looking at linux for the first real time and of course, the old laptop happens to have this network adapter… 🤦🏻
(BCM4313 802.11bgn). From the rabbit hole it’s a typical case, laptop tethers to phone fine. Ethernet during Debian 12 install (kde plasma). Detects my wifi but won’t connect (deactivated message).
In theory it should have been as easy as:
HTTPS://wiki.debian.org/wl or https://wiki.debian.org/brcm80211
Has to be the stupidest thing…
configuration: broadcast = yes driver = brcmsmac driverversion = 6.1.0-13-amd64 firmware = 610.812 ip = 172.20.10.5 latency = 0 link = yes multicast = yes wireless = IEEE 802.11
But at step 4, wl.ko does indeed exist lol
- (Optional) Check all the built DKMS kernel modules. There should be “wl.ko” in the list.
Pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to be, especially since you just installed it in step 2. I don’t see your problem here.
Thanks for your reply :-) – I just assumed that would be an issue as I go on to complete step 5 and 6 and still the same thing. I can see the wifi network and attempt to join and it never configures. Fun times
sorry I read that as wl.ko should not be the list. I need to edit my post haha
We should tell people to post the relevant lines from the
dmesgcommand, too. It usually tells if a killswitch is set or the module didn’t get loaded (properly).Good luck with your old laptop 😄
So, you’re talking about ensuring the
wldriver is loaded, but the dump at the end of your post says it’s usingbrcmsmac, a different driver for the same card. Looks like you have a mix of both now? It looks like https://wiki.debian.org/wl has a little script you can use to switch between the two, maybe try that.I just installed a broadcom 4xxx driver in KDE Neon a few days ago. The first few instructions I found didn’t work, something like *-dkms and *-source. But then, I found the command below. did you try:
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
It says unable to locate package, that’s ubuntu? That kind of loops me back around via https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=128386 to https://wiki.debian.org/wl
Isn’t there a separate package with firmware? Maybe install
firmware-brcm80211,firmware-misc-nonfreeor something like that?firmware-misc-nonfree
I got - firmware-misc-nonfree is already the newest version (20230210-5).
& for firmware-brcm80211 I got - firmware-brcm80211 is already the newest version (20230210-5).
