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Wiibuntu / Ubuntu14-Wii

Ubuntu 14 for PowerPC set up to run on the Wii
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ifconfig does not show any network interfaces besides loopback #2

Open scudo005 opened 4 months ago

scudo005 commented 4 months ago

Every time I try to update my WiFi settings with the provided script, it fails to initialize the wireless interface, and ifconfig only shows the loopback interface.

scudo005 commented 4 months ago

I did some research, and boy, is this a mess.

The Wii has a Broadcom BCM4318 wireless interface chip, who gets picked up by the kernel. The kernel tries to load the firmware for it, and promptly fails multiple times. This despite the fact that the firmware (called b43) is indeed present on the disk... but as a kernel object module. No idea if that's how it should be.

Somehow, the network manager manages to pick up a wlan1 wireless interface, but it's disabled by default, for some reason. Enabling it doesn't yield any results; wpa_supplicant fails miserably trying to do something, anything, with it. RIP.

If I run iwconfig, it tells me that wlan1 has no wireless extensions; that leads me to believe that said wlan1 is a bogus interface and I have no idea where it's coming from.

Delightful.

scudo005 commented 4 months ago

Unrelated to this issue but interesting anyways: Xubuntu 9 recognizes the wireless chip as a Broadcom BCM2045A. So I guess nobody really knows what firmware is the right one?

Wiibuntu commented 2 months ago

Have you downgraded wpa_supplicant? I had the same issue until I downgraded and then it managed to connect to my wifi. Ubuntu 14 for the Wii (powerpc) is using unstable packages by default. So you need to downgrade that package and then downgrade all the other unstable packaged to the most stable one that can run on the given Kernel.

scudo005 commented 2 months ago

I did it months ago so I am not 100% sure, but I recall trying to downgrade wpa_supplicant with the provided .deb package, and both apt and dpkg failed. I should check again though.