Manual Network Firmware Installation (brcmfmac43602)...?

[Artorious Castus]

Before you tear me a new asshole; let me start by saying yes, yes I have looked for solutions and found some appropriate sources, but nothing that has definitively solved my issue.

Debian often has missing, non-free firmware for Broadcom network cards, and I'm having trouble installing my wireless card manually after installation of a Debian based distro on my laptop. (without ethernet as well since I do not have a chord, so I’m trying to do this all manually.)

The card is a Broadcom BCM43602 802.11a/c (rev 1) on a debian distro with amd64 architecture.

The lspci -nn | grep Network
output shows:

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~#  [b]lspci -nn | grep Network[/b]
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43602 802.11ac Wireless LAN SoC [14e4:43ba] (rev 01)

The missing files involve

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brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.Apple, brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.txt, and brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.clm_blob

And the dmesg output shows -

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[    7.313980] brcmfmac: brcmf_fw_alloc_request: using brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie for chip BCM43602/1
[    7.343833] brcmfmac 0000:03:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.bin
[    7.344537] brcmfmac 0000:03:00.0: firmware: failed to load brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.Apple Inc.-iMac16,2.txt (-2)
[    7.344539] firmware_class: See https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing firmware
[    7.344540] brcmfmac 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.Apple Inc.-iMac16,2.txt failed with error -2
[    7.344554] brcmfmac 0000:03:00.0: firmware: failed to load brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.txt (-2)
[    7.344555] brcmfmac 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.txt failed with error -2
[    7.866779] brcmfmac: brcmf_fw_alloc_request: using brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie for chip BCM43602/1
[    7.867233] brcmfmac 0000:03:00.0: firmware: failed to load brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.clm_blob (-2)
[    7.867236] brcmfmac: brcmf_c_process_clm_blob: no clm_blob available (err=-2), device may have limited channels available
[    7.868143] brcmfmac: brcmf_c_preinit_dcmds: Firmware: BCM43602/1 wl0: Nov 10 2015 06:38:10 version 7.35.177.61 (r598657) FWID 01-ea662a8c
[   12.475721] broken atomic modeset userspace detected, disabling atomic

I located what I believe to be all the missing firmware files:

- https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/ ... 1/download

- https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/ ... s/download

- https://wiki.debian.org/brcmfmac

Along with the other packages like bc (https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/bc/download)

That I think I need to get my network controller running in a Debian distro.

I don’t have an ethernet chord so all of these debian packages had to be downloaded and unpackages with manually.
While I have read the Debian wiki page(link), I couldn’t move forward because of my complete lack of internet access in the first place.

After getting the files I straight unpacked them with dkms (dynamic kernel module support)
The iwconfig output shows that it does detect a wireless card, so I really have no idea what went wrong.

But I get the itching feeling that it’s me and something I’m doing wrong.

Thanks for your advice in advanced.

[Deb-fan]

Is it an Apple/Mac system? Just did the same thing you/anyone would and googled your wireless component. Instructions for setting it up seemed very straightforward but named a slightly different package than the one you're using. Interface is apparently recognized, should mean good to go but you kept saying don't have a cord, yada, yada etc, etc. Do you have internet access? That'd be kind of crucial in getting networking setup and working. Am assuming you do have at least access to WiFi?

Basically your post is all over the place and confusing, you dl'ed a Sid PKG, say Debian-based (what-which?) Folks are unlikely to go through a game of 50 questions to help someone out. Know the pain of Broadcom, really isnt bad, always end up manually setting Debian up for my wireless interface, tends to be a matter of 2pkgs, in my case(not yours obviously) kernel headers and broadcom-sta-dkms ... done.

Cool trick I've learned from dorking with this, someone can install missing pkgs like this while using a live session chroot from distro's which do support a problem child interface out-of-box. Doesn't matter which, someone can use a Ubuntu iso, have used Arch thumb-drives to fiddle with Debian and vice versa. Meaning I installed the missing pkgs on a Debian install to get wireless working using another distro in live session. There's a decent enough how-to on live session chroot ...
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=1192

[Artorious Castus]

Is it an Apple/Mac system? Just did the same thing you/anyone would and googled your wireless component. Instructions for setting it up seemed very straightforward but named a slightly different package than the one you're using. Interface is apparently recognized, should mean good to go but you kept saying don't have a cord, yada, yada etc, etc. Do you have internet access? That'd be kind of crucial in getting networking setup and working. Am assuming you do have at least access to WiFi?

Basically your post is all over the place and confusing, you dl'ed a Sid PKG, say Debian-based (what-which?) Folks are unlikely to go through a game of 50 questions to help someone out. Know the pain of Broadcom, really isnt bad, always end up manually setting Debian up for my wireless interface, tends to be a matter of 2pkgs, in my case(not yours obviously) kernel headers and broadcom-sta-dkms ... done.

Cool trick I've learned from dorking with this, someone can install missing pkgs like this while using a live session chroot from distro's which do support a problem child interface out-of-box. Doesn't matter which, someone can use a Ubuntu iso, have used Arch thumb-drives to fiddle with Debian and vice versa. Meaning I installed the missing pkgs on a Debian install to get wireless working using another distro in live session. There's a decent enough how-to on live session chroot ...
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=1192

I’ve got internet access via wireless, but it is limited. I cannot access repositories even after updating the sourcelist file.
Basically, internet access is limited to just basic browsing, but no downloading (over the web or via the konsole).

I mentioned that the architecture is amd64 and the SID package was just basic calculator, since my distro didn’t come with it by default (I’m not sure if that makes a huge difference or not.)

And by Debian based distro, I’m talking offensive security’s Kali Linux if that helps in any way.

I’ll look into this live session loophole and see what I can do…

Thanks.

[Deb-fan]

Live chroot with a messed up sources file isn't going to work. Yes you'll need to populate (add the correct repositories to) the sources.list file and refresh PKG lists after ie: "sudo apt update", obviously if you don't have/use sudo, then do it as plain root user. You installed a calculator from unstable? Errr, okay, generally speaking it's a bad idea to mix pkgs from Sid w/o a basic understanding and reason. Sounds like you can do web browsing in Kali? If so clearly the wireless interface works. Ah anyway, good luck.

[stevepusser]

Kali is different from Debian in many critical ways, and really isn't meant to even be installed!

Anyway, you could try my port of the Ubuntu "linux-firmware" package, which has all their firmware in one big deb package. It will remove most or all of the Debian firmware packages by design, so use apt to install the local deb file, since dpkg won't remove any files, and you may end up with an install failure.

http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/pool/ahs/l/linux-firmware/

[p.H]

internet access is limited to just basic browsing, but no downloading

Network-wise, there is no difference between browsing and downloading. Both involve HTTP or HTTPS connections (unless you download through FTP, but this is becoming rare).

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I’m talking offensive security’s Kali Linux

That is not supported here.

And just FYI your query won't be supported at the Kali forums either because that distribution is for people who actually know what they're doing.

[cuckooflew]

Artorious Castus wrote:
I’m talking offensive security’s Kali Linux

See http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=145786

Logic would say this thread should be locked as well, Kali, is NOT Debian,

[Bulkley]

Kali . . . really isn't meant to even be installed!

A few years back I knew a couple of techs who used Kali in their work. They both had Kali live-CDs. They used them for troubleshooting big systems. Neither would consider using Kali for desktop or laptop.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Logic would say this thread should be locked as well

+1

[trinidad]

+++1

"Kali".... Magic word to attract Homer Simpson (doh!) pseudo-hackers.

TC