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user9898

Member

Registered: 2020-06-26

Posts: 19  

BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

Hello Community,

I installed Devuan on a old Acer Notebook AO751h which has a comes with a old Broadcom module (BCM4312)

During startup I get the following error message.

[   19.402445] b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode15.fw" not found
[   19.402660] b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode15.fw" not found
[   19.402897] b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Dri … cefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website.

How do I please get it work ?

Do I need enable a special repository like on Debian by adding some special lines to my

sources.list

or do I need to download some kind of archive ?

Thanks and regards

jmarinho

Member

Registered: 2019-04-02

Posts: 2  

Re: BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

Hi.

I think you should take a look at this page:

https://wiki.debian.org/wl

I think you will find a solution there.

Hope this helps.

Last edited by jmarinho (2020-06-26 17:12:28)

Vernon

Member

Registered: 2020-07-19

Posts: 89  

Re: BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

Updated 07/23/2020 to account for Devuan Beowulf installation of network manager connman.

This is what worked for me with my Dell Vostro A90 netbook BCM4312 WiFi and LXQt.

First, I added  non-free contrib to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. My un-commented  parts of my /etc/apt/sources.list file look like

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf main non-free contrib
deb-src http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf main non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security main non-free contrib
deb-src http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security main non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates main non-free contrib
deb-src http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates main non-free contrib

Then I issued the following commands as root.

apt-get update

apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') broadcom-sta-dkms

Reboot. Devuan did not install a graphical WiFi manager I assume because I had no working WiFi during installation. I chose to install wicd by issuing the following command as root.

apt-get install wicd

Since we now have wicd network manager installed, we no loger have need for network manger connman which was installed during installation. Remove it by issuing the following commands as root.

apt-get remove connman
apt-get purge connman

Finally, I commented out the line referencing the eth0 device in my /etc/network/interfaces files in order stop the boot process from pausing when there is no Ethernet cable connected. My /etc/network/interfaces file now looks like this.

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
# allow-hotplug eth0
# iface eth0 inet dhcp

Last edited by Vernon (2020-07-23 16:06:09)

Debuser2018

Member

From: Muvattupuzha

Registered: 2018-01-24

Posts: 117  

Website

Re: BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

Did you installed b43-fwcutter  firmware-b43-installer packages?

Last edited by Debuser2018 (2020-07-19 21:42:30)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') broadcom-sta-dkms

Easier technique:

# apt install module-assistant
# m-a prepare
# apt install broadcom-sta-dkms

---

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

Vernon

Member

Registered: 2020-07-19

Posts: 89  

Re: BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

Did you installed b43-fwcutter  firmware-b43-installer packages?

No. is this a better performance option than the broadcom-sta-dkms package?

Last edited by Vernon (2020-07-21 01:49:33)

Debuser2018

Member

From: Muvattupuzha

Registered: 2018-01-24

Posts: 117  

Website

Re: BCM4312 on a old Acer AO751h

Did you installed b43-fwcutter  firmware-b43-installer packages?

No. is this a better performance option than the broadcom-sta-dkms package?

I used a long back. I think, I was using b43-fwcutter.
https://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx

Last edited by Debuser2018 (2020-07-21 07:37:32)