Monday, June 22, 2015

More issues with Fedora 22 and BCM43227 wireless adapter

I upgraded my quad-core Acer laptop to Fedora 22 (scratch install, I don't trust fedup and because OS/2 was such a pain) and of course, the Broadcom wireless adapter on my laptop would not work.

I did a lot of Googling on this one but did not find anything that solve my problem.  I checked dmesg and noticed messages about not being able to find b43-open/ucode30_mimo.fw file.  I noticed that /etc/modprobe.d/ files did not have any blacklisting for the b43 driver.  I did notice that /usr/lib/modprobe.d/broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf did contain blacklisting for b43 drivers.  This got me to thinking about why broadcom-wl package is installed.

I looked at the files in the broadcom-wl package
/usr/share/doc/broadcom-wl/README_6.30.223.248.txt made reference to instructions on how the package is built.  I ran the following command to see what was in the directory:

ls /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build

I noticed that the directory was empty.  When I ran the following command:

ls /lib/modules/`uname -r`

I notived the build directory was a symbolic link to the kernel headers.  This link showed up red in my terminator session which I knew right away kernel-devel package was not installed.

I ran the following 2 commands and without rebooting, the NetworkManger applet showed my BCM43227 correctly.

sudo dnf install kernel-devel
sudo dnf reinstall akmod-wl
sudo dnf reinstall broadcom-wl

I am not sure the reinstall of the akmod-wl the is needed but the sequence seemed to get the wireless device working.

I tried reinstalling broadcom-wl and akmod-wl before installing the kernel-devel package. There were no errors.  This might be a bug in one of thw *-wl package prerequisites.  Not sure I want to open a bugzilla or not.

Now I can call it a night!  Only took me 90 minutes to figure out.