let’s take this as an example. i glanced over it though i am clueless about what they’re talking about. i kind of deduct that some drivers such as bcma (which runs on my system) are “blacklisted” by broadcom and/or are supposed to be “blacklisted” and “ignored” by the system on startup. or whatever. and i indeed need to run “a proprietary sta driver”. what idk however is if it is related to my issue. this is as far as i can get on my own.
so when i install broadcom-wl i have no wi-fi, inxi shows “no driver”, but lspci shows “kernel modules: bcma”. and if i remove broacom-wl inxi shows bcma-pci-bridge and wi-fi works. does all this mean that a blacklisted bcma driver conflicts with broadcom-wl and prevents it from loading? should i dive in this blacklisting thing? or is it irrelevant?
what i kindly ask anyone here is to help me help you help me
ps: another issue is i don’t have an ethernet cable available at my desk and when i tinker with broadcom driver i loose wifi so i have to go put this machine on a chair next to the router, squat infront of it, do the magic, then revert all changes back and keep on going untill next reply.
Running even “simple” commands without understanding them often leads to disaster because a) linux is constantly changing, and it is too easy to make a small mistake. You do, however, need a system that is working properly in order to learn. Otherwise you can’t tell the diffeence between a bug and “user error”.
I suspect your difficulties stem from falling behind with updates. If wifi is your only internet access, it is still possible to update your system. When people ask me which linux distro is best, I tell them to check with colleagues and friends. Many linux users are happy to help new users, and some local user groups hold periodic meetings in locations with network access with time allocated to help people get linux working on their systems. When starting out it is very useful to be able to get an
experienced user to show you how to fix issues.
If you have access to a Fedora system that has good internet access, you can take advantage dnf’s download option. The catch is that the system with internet access probably has some different hardware and is more up to date. If you install Fedora 37 (Workstation?) using a Live USB key and have not updated, you may be able to use the Live Fedora system to get most of the updates and save them to another USB key for use on the broken system. You should list the installed packages on the broken system and use dnf on the internet connected system to get the current f37 packages to replace the f36 (or even f35) packages. Note that some packages are only available for older Fedora releases for various reasons.
Another approach is to purchase or borrow a USB wifi “dongle”. They are not expensive and are handy to have when the onboard wifi isn’t working. I have cheap USB wifi and sound dongles for just that reason (and lend them to others who are having problems).
Please let us know what you decide and how it works out – for every person that posts a problem there are many other watchers who lack the confidence to post, so one role of a forum is build a databse of problems and solutions.
no, it is exactly the opposite - my problem stems from being up to date. broadcom-wl broke up on 5.19 to 6.0 kernel update (as i describe in the topic i posted above). so i spent some time on 5.19 constantly checking every new kernel release and at some point i made a mistake of reinstalling broadcom-wl on the newest kernel at the time and then it broke up to the point of not working on 5.19 either anymore.
furthermore, i have both ethernet access (though inconvenient) AND wifi. the issue is that wifi only works with bcma driver, can’t connect to 5ghz network (sp i’m on 10% dl speed limit) and is crappy in general.
so my two possible courses of action are either to hope for some thechnical advice that solves the issue (while hangin on what i have atm indefinitely) or clean reinstall of the system which seems more reasonable as the time passes because if it works then it only hurts you once.
The breakage is the failure to build the wl module from source. Most likely this is because you don’t have current package that include patches for 6.0 and 6.1 kernels:
Please compare the following output from a system where the module compiles with that is on your system:
% ls -l /usr/src/akmods
total 5672
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 5803633 Jan 3 05:09 wl-kmod-6.30.223.271-46.fc37.src.rpm
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 36 Jan 3 05:09 wl-kmod.latest -> wl-kmod-6.30.223.271-46.fc37.src.rpm
This output tells us that wl-kmod.latest is a “symbolic link” (explained in basic linux refences) to wl-kmod-6.30.223.271-46.fc37.src.rpm. Using a symbolic link makes it easy to test different versions of the package without the need to edit build configuration files with the versioned name of a kmod source file.
then again, it tells nothing to me. i keep seeing all kinds of different versions from different people here and there so i can only ignore such slight differences - that’s what i mean by “looks kind of the same to me”.
Yes. Vendors are continually adding “features” to wifi chips, and big companies (Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) can get customized versions. The wl driver supports a long list of wifi chips, and linux-hardware.org collects details of which ones work with which distribution and linux version. Unfortunately, we often only get to see the the first two fileds in the identifier. There are actually 4 fields. The two “invisible” fields should identify to the driver that to your model is (rev 02).
