LiveCD WiFi woes

matklad · December 24, 2020, 9:46am

Hey, I’ve just installed NixOS on a new computer, and the process was rather painful. I’d like to share my experience, as I feel that installation problems might be underreported due to survivorship bias.

I was installing using graphical live CD. Upon successfully booting from a live cd, I’ve noticed that I don’t have WiFI. This could have been a deal breaker, as I don’t have an ethernet cable, and hauling desktop to my router is not fun.

Luckely, I had a laptop with NixOS, so I was able to google this issue:

The TL;DR is that my broadcom WiFI card needs some proprietary stuff to work, which is not packaged by default. Luckely, I was able to build a custom live-cd with this packaged, which got me my WiFi.

Except that it wasn’t able to see my 5ghz network. I quickly googled out a handful of iwconfig, iwlist and iw commands to diagnose potential issues, but wirelesstools and iw are not packaged with a live CD by default. I think this one is an easy thing to fix.

I kinda gave up and just switch my router to use 2.4ghz band, but still.

(
after installation, I diagnosed the problem to probably be related to regulatory domain stuff (cfg80211: failed to load regulatory.db), I wasn’t able to fix it, but I worked around it well-enough by picking a different 5ghz channel on my router
)

Hope this is helpful feedback!

aanderse · December 24, 2020, 1:23pm

I’m trying to think of a time that this wasn’t ever the norm with any gnu/linux distro ever

Your cellphone, a usb cable, and the “tethering” option are always your best friends when installing any distro.

matklad · December 24, 2020, 1:35pm

I don’t know, for me, this is the first time when this happens. To be clear, the variable here is WiFi adapter, rather than distro, but still, the norm for me is either:

I boot and can fumble my way through wifi config (using graphical installer with NetworkManager, or Arch’s wifi-menu)
I boot and I need to read on wpa_supplicant and what not, but, in principle, I can setup wifi (Arch before wifi-menu, NixOS minimal CD)

jonringer · December 24, 2020, 3:15pm

One big issue here is that the drivers are not free. We would probably have to make a separate “unfree” version, or improve the documentation so it’s easier for people to create their own.

matklad · December 24, 2020, 3:28pm

(I have no idea what I am talking about)

The broadcom_sta thing I needed is unfreeRedistributable, so it should be fine to include, license wise?

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/fb875dcf6fbadafb41c64d9f4e1ef056f127bcb3/pkgs/os-specific/linux/broadcom-sta/default.nix#L63


    binDir="$out/lib/modules/${kernel.modDirVersion}/kernel/net/wireless/"
    docDir="$out/share/doc/broadcom-sta/"
    mkdir -p "$binDir" "$docDir"
    cp wl.ko "$binDir"
    cp lib/LICENSE.txt "$docDir"
  '';
  meta = {
    description = "Kernel module driver for some Broadcom's wireless cards";
    homepage = "http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php";
    license = stdenv.lib.licenses.unfreeRedistributable;
    maintainers = with stdenv.lib.maintainers; [ phreedom ];
    platforms = stdenv.lib.platforms.linux;
  };
}

jonringer · December 24, 2020, 8:11pm

Hydra still considers it unfree, so it will fail to build

$ nix eval -f default.nix lib.licenses.unfreeRedistributable
{ free = false; fullName = "Unfree redistributable"; shortName = "unfreeRedistributable"; }

It would likely be legal to distribute an iso with it, but it would have to be done outside of hydra. Or altering hydra to include packages with unfree licenses.

zimbatm · January 4, 2021, 8:30am

This is something that could be fixed easily.

I think it would be ok to change the criterion to “redistributable” only. What we don’t want is to redistribute software through the cache illegally.