Devuan, Dell Inspiron 1525, and b43 wireless network card
In my attempts to be more diverse in my GNU/Linux experience (and not be so dependent on systemd for everything), I am using Devuan on my old Dell Inspiron 1525. Getting my Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] wireless network card working was one of the harder tasks on it. Installing freeipa is another, and it involved upgrading the distro to the rolling release version, ceres.
apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
Make sure that command downloads and extracts the broadcom driver. I think that package is from the contrib or non-free package set (in sources.list) and not main. If it does not do the downloading part, you might have to remove the package and install it again.
modprobe | grep -E 'b43|wl|bcm'
Make sure the kernel module was installed by checking for it with modprobe. I rebooted at various points, but it might not be necessary to do so. If you have to remove and add it again, use modprobe -r b43 ; modprobe b43. I could then see the device listed when I ran
ip link show
I tried to enable it:
ip link set wlan0 up
But it warned me that it might not be able to do that because of rf-kill. Rather than remember/search how to do that on the cli, I just switched to wicd and checked the box for "switch on wifi." Then I could set it up. I also had to configure wicd to use "wlan0" as the wireless network card. And I threw in some service networking restart in here somewhere as well. After all that, then wicd saw the wireless networks near me and I could join my wireless network!
Conclusion
Interesting, how running from systemd has made me embrace closed-source drivers. I don't know what to say about that. But my laptop is not dependent on a wired network connection or systemd.
Additional notes
eudev:amd64 in ceres is giving me grief and will not install, which messes up pulseaudio I think, and certainly bluez and xserver-xorg-core. If you try this whole process on an Inspiron 1525, go with the 32-bit devuan and let me know it if works better.
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