Broadcom BCM43142 wifi issues

Help
1

Hello,
I’m new to NixOS and while I’ve used other Linux distros from Ubuntu to Arch, I’m having problems getting my BCM43142 wifi card working. The card has worked fine in other distros without any hassle post-install, but NixOS seemingly didn’t install a driver like many others do.

I’ve attempted:

  • installing different versions of the seemingly correct driver ( linuxKernel.packages.linux_6_6.broadcom_sta, linuxKernel.packages.linux_latest_libre.broadcom_sta )
  • installing broadcom-bt-firmware (didn’t help with wifi nor bluetooth)
  • setting boot.kernelModules = [”wl” ”broadcom_sta”] since I don’t know what I’m doing, and wl (whatever it stands for since it’s very difficult to search online without getting results on Wayland) still doesn’t get found by modprobe.

I’d appreciate any help or directions on what I should be doing instead!

Kernel: 6.6.47
NixOS: 24.05.4396.ae2fc9e0e42c (Uakari)

2

Hello,

I recently made modifications (for the greater good) to the broadcom-sta driver: linuxPackages_latest.broadcom_sta: add patches by drupol · Pull Request #337948 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub for Apple iMac 14,2: init by drupol · Pull Request #1089 · NixOS/nixos-hardware · GitHub

Make sure you’re using the latest kernel and the nixos-unstable branch and you’ll be having those new things. Most probably this will fix your issue.

3 Likes
3

I’ll give it a try, thank you!

4

I regret to inform that this unfortunately did not solve my problem with my wifi card. I initially attempted installing just the unstable packages (as explained here) after upgrading my kernel to latest, but since that didn’t work I changed to the unstable branch fully, but unfortunately that did not cause the driver to work either.

5

Does this work?

  # load broadcom wireless driver
  boot.kernelModules = [ "wl" ];
  boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [ broadcom_sta ];
  
  # blacklist similar modules to avoid collision
  boot.blacklistedKernelModules = [ "b43" "bcma" ];

I got this from a GitHub search for similar configs.

2 Likes
6

Yes, that worked, on the unstable branch at least. Thank you so much! I’ll see if it works on the stable branch as well, but if not then I’ll keep it as it is right now.

Edi: The solution works on the stable version 24.05 Uakari as well.

1 Like