Wireless Army
This is a blog / tips and tricks website for web developers and security researchers.
follow us in feedly


install wifi driver on older devices
by admin
 at 2022-03-14 12:45:12.

Broadcom 4360 actually comes with either of two distinct chips, 14E4:4360 and 14E4:43A0. There is no driver in Linux for the first one, while wl is an appropriate driver for the second one. You can determine which one you have by means of the following command:

lspci -vnn | grep -i net

If instead you wish to do this from within Mac OS, hit the Apple -> About this Mac -> More Info-> System Info, and then click on Wi-fi. You will find a line like

Card Type: AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x117)

which displays Vendor (14E4) and Product (117, in my case) code of the Wi-fi card.

There is no support for Broadcom 4360 14E4:4360 on Linux. The definitive guide in these matters is Linux Wireless, which gives in this table the list of all Broadcomm wireless chips, and the available Linux drivers. As you can see, no driver is listed under BCM4360 14E4:4360.

Two lines below in the same table, it is shown that the other chip with which 4360 is produced, 14E4:43A0, is instead supported by the proprietary driver wl. The correct procedure to install this driver is described here, in the Debian Wiki. For Wheezy, you should add this line

deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

to the file /etc/apt/sources.list, then run

apt-get update
apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') broadcom-sta-dkms

and lastly you will need to remove some conflicting drivers which come pre-installed in Debian:

modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcmsmac

Now you are good to go:

modprobe wl

You should also keep the following in mind: about the wl driver, this is what the ever informative Arch Linux wiki has to say:

Warning: Even though this driver has matured a lot throughout the years and works quite well now, its usage is recommended only when neither of the two open-source drivers support your device. Please refer to project b43's page for list of supported devices.