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 tried booting it from live+nonfree image > (https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/11.3.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/), > but still no luck (WiFi doesn't work). As I understand, the needed > drivers would load when installing the system, but they do not load in > live mode. There is a misunderstanding here. Debian's non-free images do not contain proprietary drivers, but they provide firmware for the devices, so that the in-kernel drivers can actually work. If the non-free image does not work, the firmware for your device is missing because of licensing reasons. There is a package named firmware-b43-installer in contrib which downloads Broadcom's old drivers and extracts the firmware from them. Obviously you need a network connection for that, so you might have to use it on another system. Good luck, Sven 1. https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/firmware-b43-installer