I’ve been trying to install Manjaro on a brand new laptop for 48 hours and keep hitting a brick wall as the installer cannot connect to wifi! Without displaying any errors, you’ll note.
After testing a lot of stuff (including other distros – no wifi there either!), I finally realized today (thanks to a passing comment on a forum) that the problem was with my wireless card… which is, yes, a Broadcom! Just my luck.
I’ve found a lot of people who said they had wifi working during install but that it failed afterwards. In my case, there’s no wifi right off the bat!
For reference, this is the ISO I downloaded:
(the regular 64 bit version, though I also tried with the minimal with same result)
On a side note, I burned it to a USB stick using Rufus.
So here are some of the things I’ve checked:
- Downloaded ISO was not corrupt: hash checked out OK.
- while I do have a wireless hotkey it has no light or other visual cue indicating whether it’s on or off… I did hit it a couple of times at random, but no change
- rfkill list: displays “no” to both soft and hard blocked
- I have no wireless icon in the taskbar, only Network Manager… but maybe this is normal?
- the installed driver for wifi is bcma-pci-bridge… I figured I should replace it with b43, considering some of the answers I’ve found online, so I did “modprobe -r bcma” followed by “modprobe b43 allhwsupport=1”… when I checked inxi -Nazy again bcma was back???
- pacman -Q | grep b43-fwcutter ==> shows as installed (version 019-3)
- pacman -Q | manjaro-firmware ==> shows as installed (version 20160419-1)
- pacman -Q | linux316-broadcom-wl ==> not installed (which is good, apparently!)
With all that said, here’s some information I got from inxi -Fzx… Sorry I can’t do a copy-paste since I have to use a different computer to connect to the internet. So I’m only including the basics. Let me know if you need anything else.
SYSTEM
Kernel 5.8.16-2-MANJARO x86_64
Xfce 4.14.2
MACHINE
Acer laptop / Aspire ES1-431 V3.72
Motherboard: Acer Magellan_BA Type2
CPU
Dual Core Intel Celeron N3050
GRAPHICS
Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000
Display server: x11 1.20.9
Resolution: 1366x768 ~60Hz
AUDIO
Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000
Sound server: ALSA k5.8.16-2-MANJARO
NETWORK
Wifi device: Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g/n
Driver: bcma-pci-bridge
(there is also an ethernet device but I don't use it)
I hope someone can help me figure this out, as it’s driving me crazy! LOL
EDIT: I forgot to mention that since the OS never displayed a list of available wifi networks, I had to add mine manually. Password was correct, but I don’t know if I got everything else right. Still, I figure if something was wrong in there I’d at least get some sort of error message…