Need Linux drivers for old laptop

[HeroRareheart]

I'm setting up an old laptop and have installed that last 32-bit Ubuntu release, 18.04, on it. I need to get it's Wi-Fi working but can't seem to compile or install the driver for it. The laptop is an old Acer Aspire One D250 and I tried downloading the Wireless LAN Driver for it from the manufactures website here but it seems to be for an ACHENT kerel version. I said screw it and tried to compile the driver anyways but it failed for obvious reasons. Seeing the folder containing the files was named "compat-wireless" I did an internet search for that and found this page leading me to the Driver Backports Wiki and I'm just confused now. Clearly I'm on the right path but I'm missing something, can anyone point me to the drivers I need or inform me on what I'm missing?

[OldTweaker]

Maybe you can try ndiswrapper. That allows you to use a windows wifi driver within Linux. Not a pretty solution, but may work. 

 

[finest feck fips]

16 hours ago, HeroRareheart said:

The laptop is an old Acer Aspire One D250 and I tried downloading the Wireless LAN Driver for it from the manufactures website here

Per that support page, different Acer Aspire One D250s can have entirely different wireless cards from one another. What driver you need will depend on what wireless card you actually have. The Linux driver they list there is only for one of the many wireless cards that AOD250s shipped with, and it may not have anything to do with the card in your machine.

 

16 hours ago, HeroRareheart said:

have installed that last 32-bit Ubuntu release, 18.04, on it.

Don't do this to yourself. Ubuntu 18.04 is no longer receiving hardware enablement updates as of the most recent Ubuntu release, and it's a dead-end for 32-bit x86 computers. You should run a distro that still supports 32-bit x86 processors today. Personally, the first distro I'd try is openSUSE Tumbleweed  and choose a Plasma or XFCE desktop in the installer, which are good choices for older or underpowered hardware like an old netbook.

 

16 hours ago, HeroRareheart said:

Seeing the folder containing the files was named "compat-wireless" I did an internet search for that and found this page leading me to the Driver Backports Wiki and I'm just confused now.

Good detective work! But I understand why you're confused. Let me know if this clears it up:

compat-wireless was not a project that added missing drivers to the Linux kernel, or contained extra drivers that were not normally included inside the Linux kernel. Rather, it was a project that took drivers which had been added to recent Linux kernels and modified them to make them compatible with old Linux kernels, so that users running older Linux kernels could still use devices that required those drivers.

Because at least one of the wifi cards that shipped in machines sold under the AOD250 name was supported by open-source drivers, on their driver page they simply linked to the compat-wireless tarball that was current at the time.

Since you're running a kernel much newer than anything that was out at the time, if your AOD250 included that wifi card, it'd already be working, because your kernel definitely includes that driver already. We can conclude that you have one of the other wifi cards instead.

 

16 hours ago, HeroRareheart said:

can anyone point me to the drivers I need or inform me on what I'm missing?

A look at all the Wireless LAN drivers for Windows 7 on the support page you linked tells us that we could be looking at one of four wifi chipsets, manufactured by Atheros, Broadcom, Broadcom, and Intel respectively (see the Vendor section of each).

Atheros and Intel's drivers are open-source straight from the manufacturer. Any remotely recent distro running on an old laptop with Atheros or Intel wireless will have support built-in. Thus we can assume that your wireless card is one of the two Broadcom models.

(Incidentally, Broadcom's support for Linux desktops and laptops is notoriously bad, and most Linux drivers for Broadcom wireless cards are reverse-engineered rather than provided by the manufacturer. Broadcom does supply proprietary Linux drivers for some of their chipsets, notably the wifi chipsets of some home routers.)

The support page directly tells us the chipset for one of the Broadcom cards, namely BRM4312. The other one seems to be a generic Broadcom driver package supporting a bunch of different Broadcom hardware. We could probably figure out what range of hardware it supports if we did a bunch of tedious work looking at device IDs in the .inf files in the provided ZIP file... but that's a lot of tedious work.

If your netbook has a BRM4312 card, there are two drivers that will support it. One is Broadcom's proprietary driver, and the other is the open-source b43 driver which comes in the Linux kernel but requires Broadcom's proprietary firmware blob in order to work.

To try the open-source driver on Ubuntu 18.04, run:

 

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer && sudo modprobe b43

That should probably be enough to get a BCM4312 (the Linux convention is to shorten Broadcom to BCM rather than BRM, for whatever reason) card working, but if it doesn't pop up in NetworkManager, you might try a reboot after that.

If that detects the card, but it doesn't work properly or it's unstable, let me know and I'll walk you through installing the proprietary driver (packaged as bcmwl-kernel-source) and disabling the open-source driver.

If your wireless card is still not detected, run

lspci | nc termbin.com 9999

and post the link it gives you in a reply to this post. That'll probably lead us to the exact chipset of your wireless card, if it doesn't tell us outright.

[HeroRareheart]

20 hours ago, finest feck fips said:

Don't do this to yourself. Ubuntu 18.04 is no longer receiving hardware enablement updates as of the most recent Ubuntu release, and it's a dead-end for 32-bit x86 computers. You should run a distro that still supports 32-bit x86 processors today. Personally, the first distro I'd try is openSUSE Tumbleweed  and choose a Plasma or XFCE desktop in the installer, which are good choices for older or underpowered hardware like an old netbook.

I picked Ubuntu because in the past when I needed 32-bit Linux I spent a ton of time looking for a good distro only to be disappointed with antiX so I fell back on an old Ubuntu release because quite simply Ubuntu is comfortable to use as a noob. I just never thought about looking again but it's probably a good idea to try something new next time around or even on the PC I'm trying to make into a media center PC downstairs. 32-bit Ubuntu is not playing nice with video playback. Perhaps even trying it on this laptop even though I got Ubuntu working would still be a good idea seeing as this will likely be reused by some senior citizen for email and zoom.

21 hours ago, finest feck fips said:

That should probably be enough to get a BCM4312...card working.

It did work, thank you. So far it seems to be stable

21 hours ago, finest feck fips said:

compat-wireless was not a project that added missing drivers to the Linux kernel, or contained extra drivers that were not normally included inside the Linux kernel. Rather, it was a project that took drivers which had been added to recent Linux kernels and modified them to make them compatible with old Linux kernels, so that users running older Linux kernels could still use devices that required those drivers.

This makes a ton of sense now, the documentation wasn't the most clear on that.

[finest feck fips]

Great! glad that was helpful. I did a bit of testing of 32-bit openSUSE Tumbleweed for you in a VM today, since it's been a while since I ran it myself. If you decide you'd like to give it a try, there are a couple things you'll want to do after setup. openSUSE's first-party repos are almost all F/OSS, so there's a single third-party repo you want to add for the non-free stuff, including the firmware for your wireless card.

1. Install opi, which is kinda like an AUR wrapper on Arch Linux. It lets you automatically search all third-party repositories for openSUSE for stuff to install, and then it will let you install software with or without permanently adding those repos to your system. It also has some other stuff for convenience.

   • sudo zypper install opi

      

2. Add the Packman repository, install multimedia codecs, and ensure that you're preferring the Packman versions of multimedia libraries.

   • sudo opi codecs && sudo zypper dist-upgrade --from packman --allow-vendor-change

     Note that opi isn't doing anything occult here. The above is equivalent to:

   • sudo zypper addrepo --check --refresh --priority 90 https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ packman && sudo zypper install --from packman ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-libav libavcodec-full vlc-codecs && sudo zypper dist-upgrade --from packman --allow-vendor-change

      

3. Install the firmware packages for really old Broadcom cards (the firmware for newer ones is installed by default).

   • sudo zypper install b43-firmware b43legacy-firmware

      

4. Install a decent power management tool (which you don't need to configure) and a couple other minor things, like unrar.

   • sudo zypper install --type pattern laptop non_oss

      

5. Optionally, you may want to enable Flatpak, in case something you want isn't in the default repositories. You can install Flatpak with

   • sudo zypper install flatpak && flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

     And you can install Snappy with:

   • sudo opi snapd

      

6. Reboot to let your wifi kernel modules autoload, now that the firmware is in place.
7. I noticed that when installing the b43 and b43legacy firmware blobs, there's some output that suggests b43-fwcutter doesn't recognize the zip files containing the firmware blobs, even though the installation also seems to succeed. If you have any issues with wifi after this first reboot, you can install the proprietary Broadcom drivers like this:

   • sudo zypper install broadcom-wl

   • If you do choose to install the proprietary Broadcom drivers in this way, the open-source drivers will automatically be disabled for you.
   • if you change to the proprietary driver, the easiest way to start using it after you install it is to reboot.

 

openSUSE includes several supported desktop environments. These instructions will work for you no matter which one you choose. I'm partial to Plasma, and GNOME (which you're using on Ubuntu 18.04) is also available. If both of those feel too slow for your old netbook, XFCE could be a good choice, so in that case give it a try.

If you choose to install one desktop environment and you want help switching to another without doing a full reinstall, start a new thread and I'll show you how. openSUSE makes it pretty easy, but it feels off-topic for this thread.

[finest feck fips]

If your video playback problems are occurring in-browser, they can probably be addressed by enabling hardware acceleration in a recent version of Firefox. If you want to try that after you install a distribution that supports recent versions of Firefox, like openSUSE, feel free to create a thread and tag me in it.

(As you've probably already noticed, Google does not offer 32-bit Chrome downloads anymore, and it seems Chromium also does not build on 32-bit systems anymore.)

If YouTube is what you're after, an app called MiniTube may help, since it lets you bypass the browser and play the videos as streams in a proper multimedia app.

[HeroRareheart]

On 10/31/2021 at 8:14 PM, finest feck fips said:

If you decide you'd like to give it a try, there are a couple things you'll want to do after setup.

I have a Gateway laptop that's basically identical to this one, so perhaps I'll try it on that one in a few days.