Making BCM43142 Wireless Chipset Work on Debian

Posted 13 Oct 2013

So I couldn't get WiFi to work on my SolydK installation. It does come with a nifty tool called 'Device Driver Manager', but even that couldn't find a driver for my wireless chipset, the Broadcom BCM43142. Some other Broadcom drivers sure are available in the Debian repos, but this one isn't. So I did the only sensible thing to do: searched the Web. And here's the solution.

Note: I assume that you know the basics of apt-get and cd commands.

What's your chipset?

Open the terminal and run

lspci | grep BCM

and check if the output contains BCM43142. If it does, this post is for you.

Get the driver

Run

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms broadcom-sta-modules

If it freaks out with the first package, just skip that one.

Download this deb package.
cd into the directory containing the package.

Install it using

sudo dpkg -i wireless-bcm43142-dkms_6.20.55.19-1_amd64.deb

Activate it.
```
sudo modprobe wl
```
Done. It should work now.

What's inside?

I haven't checked, but there's one thing I know: the person who has provided the deb package, has tweaked a copy of the driver package found inside an Ubuntu installation.

Source

jas.gemnetworks.com