On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 07:29:47AM -0000, Curt wrote: > On 2022-06-26, Sven Joachim <svenj...@gmx.de> wrote: > > On 2022-06-25 18:11 +0300, Kristijonas Lukas Bukauskas wrote: > > > >> I have an old Dell laptop with Broadcom BCM43142 WiFi device > >> (https://wiki.debian.org/wl). It doesn't have a hard drive, so I > >> sometimes boot Debian from USB Memory Stick in live mode. > >> The problem is that WiFi doesn't work because of the proprietary drivers > >> it needs. > > > > Probably you do not need proprietary drivers for your card, but it > > requires non-free firmware. Which on these old Broadcom devices is a > > PITA, because Broadcom did not make it easily available. > > > > I'm reading he needs to build the driver from source using > 'broadcom-sta-dkms'.
That was my take too. I chalked that up to the inherently ambiguous "driver" term. Perhaps we should try to be more specific and actually say "kernel module" (that's what goes into your kernel) or "firmware" (that's what goes into your network card hardware). In the current case we seem to be dealing with a kernel module whose license isn't compatible to the kernel's, so it can't be distributed as part of it. Cheers -- t
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