I’m just getting my feet wet here with EOS, and already appreciate a wealth of friendly how-to’s on the forum and wiki.
I’m currently in a bit of a constrained environment. I’m using a older iMac 18,2 box, in which I will not be able to use a hard wire for internet connectivity (strictly wireless). Having said that, I installed EndeavourOS in a ‘offline’ state and am currently unable to update anything else until I can get the brcmfmac driver installed and running for Wi-Fi. I have already done some due diligence on the EOS forum here and on the Arch Wiki page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Broadcom_wireless) to see if I could get this figured out myself.
I ran the ‘$ lspci -vnn -d 14e4:’ command in the terminal and found out what wireless driver I would need (I think), which is the brcmfmac driver. I went to URL https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers/brcm80211.html#supported-chips, and did some poking around there, which then led me to the index : kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git webpage. I believe I have downloaded the correct brcmfmac driver (linux-firmware-ea1178515b8852a5ead23b165b4609ef2b49f36c.tar.gz), but beside using the sudo command, I’m not not sure exactly how to install it.
Also not sure if I need to install an additional ‘wl’ driver along with the brcmfmac driver as well. I have included some driver pics for my setup below. Thanks for any assistance in advance…
The brcmfmac is a kernel module so it would automatically load. You may need to install the broadcom-wl-dkms package for that chip.
Edit: Also sometimes it requires that you blacklist a certain module if they interfere. Not sure if broadcom-wl or broadcom-wl-dkms is already installed?
You can check with
pacman -Qi broadcom-wl
or
pacman -Qi broadcom-wl-dkms
Edit: I just checked and it looks like that chip does use brcmfmac.
So you could uninstall broadcom-wl or the dkms version if they are installed or just blacklist the broadcom-wl module and see if that works.
Hi ricklinux,
Thanks for your response. So, I found out that broadcom-wl isn’t installed and broadcom-wl-dkms is. When I ran pacman -Qi broadcom-wl-dkms in the terminal, it showed the following Conflicts With : broadcom-wl. I went to /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-wl.conf and added blacklist broadcom-wl (saved the file with Admin). I am still unable to use Wi-Fi.
I went and installed the broadcom-wl-dkms driver (broadcom-wl-dkms-6.30.223.271-38-x86_64.pkg) using the following command sudo pacman -U broadcom-wl-dkms-6.30.223.271-38-x86_64.pkg. It went and installed the driver, but I still can’t use Wi-Fi.
I restarted the computer and ran nmcli device wifi list, nothing. I then tried nmcli device wifi rescan, still nothing. Am I still missing a step, or doing something wrong? Should I go ahead and uninstall broadcom-wl with sudo pacman -Rn broadcom-wl, and leave it blacklisted? Thanks.
The commands were to check if either broadcom-wl or broadcom-wl-dkms were installed. To remove the package you have to unistall it. sudo pacman -R broadcom-wl or sudo pacman -R broadcom-wl-dkms will remove which ever package is installed.
What you showed above is only removing the module that is loaded on boot.
Edit: If you properly remove the broadcom package then when you boot it should load the brcmfmac kernel module and there shouldn’t be any conflict with the broadcom package since it isn’t installed and it can’t load anything.
Edit: As far as i know the chip should use brcmfmac. Hopefully I’m not wrong.
Edit: Some of the macs or imacs use the broadcom package as they are proprietary. Then there is also the legacy.
I uninstalled broadcom-wl-dkms with sudo pacman -R broadcom-wl-dkms, rebooted, Bam, the brcmfmac loaded up, and I can now use Wi-Fi.
Looks like my hang-up was thinking that broadcom-wl or broadcom-wl-dkms had to be installed/present. Once I uninstalled broadcom-wl-dkms (broadcom-wl was never there), Wi-Fi was enabled.
Thanks again for your time on this ricklinux. And sorry for all the back in-forth above, have a good one sir…
