It was a frustrating experience. And I would like to save anyone who is trying to do some of the same things some of the headache I suffered. I want to make a standard disclaimer that I am not an expert, but what I will be going over worked for me.
The hardware:
* EGLOBAL single board PC with i5-5200U. Basically this one, but it might have been a different listing.
* Broadcom BCM43225 WIFI N + BT 3.0 chip (this was an inexpensive upgrade from whatever would have come with the computer otherwise, after all I went through, I am not necessarily convinced it is an upgrade.)
* 8GB RAM (Amazon)
* 120 GB Kingston SSD (Amazon)
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Let me start off by saying, I wish I had not bothered with "upgrading" to the WIFI + BT module instead of the other WIFI module, because it probably would have been the one advertised as 300M, implying 5.0 GHz wifi and therefore probably a newer 802.11ab device. That said, lets get started.
I spent a long, frustrating evening trying to get this to work under CentOS 7.2. After that failed (attempting to the wl module, from Broadcom), I installed Debian, since some searching seemed to indicate that might work. Basically, I kept seeing a bunch of weird messages using the brmcsmac module and I really wanted to use the b43 one instead. brmcsmac could see APs, but I couldn't get it to connect.
It might be a good idea to go ahead and su to root, because all of these steps require it anyway. Your choice.
The main steps are:
1. install b43 firmware
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sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
2. blacklist brcsmac
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sudo modprobe -r brcmsmac bcma
sudo modprobe b43
echo "blacklist drivername" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-broadcom-wireless.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
(Debian is often configured not to use sudo by default, in that case just get rid of the "sudo"s)
ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiD ... en_drivers
3. Configure the b43 kernel module
create a file /etc/modprobe.d/local-b43.conf containing the lines
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# Activate experimental support for some hardware revisions
options b43 allhwsupport=1
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rmmod b43
modprobe b43
4. Manually bring up your interface
Find your wireless interface and bring it up:
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ip a
iwconfig
ip link set wlan0 up
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iwlist scan
5. wpa_supplicant install and make psk
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aptitude update
aptitude install wpasupplicant
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chmod 0600 /etc/network/interfaces
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wpa_passphrase myssid my_very_secret_passphrase
(If you need to find or confirm your desired SSID see here. The short version is to use iwconfig iwlist scan
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network={
ssid="myssid"
#psk="my_very_secret_passphrase"
psk=ccb290fd4fe6b22935cbae31449e050edd02ad44627b16ce0151668f5f53c01b
}
ref: https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse#wpa_supplicant
6. Open /etc/network/interfaces in a text editor (i prefer nano or vim):
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nano /etc/network/interfaces
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auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid myssid
wpa-psk ccb290fd4fe6b22935cbae31449e050edd02ad44627b16ce0151668f5f53c01b
Save the file and exit the editor.
Bring your interface up. This will start wpa_supplicant as a background process.
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ifup wlan0
I hope this all makes sense. I included my references for two reasons. The first is that I want to give credit where credit is due and I pretty much copied the linked pages (with some minor modifications). Secondly, I may have missed something, but I'm pretty sure the links I provided will give you all of the information you will need to know.