wifi driver help
a bit of a noob here - specifically a steam deck power user that wants nothing more than to eliminate windows from my desktop gaming rig (and life entirely) . so everything was going great; plowing thru flavours of linux till my noob heart was content - but at some point i made my wifi driver disappear. wifi works fine in windows; but not at all in any linux distro: unclaimed network, wifi hw missing, driver n/a. i found and dl'd the correct driver from intel; i've sudo-commanded my damn machine to move the damn driver from the download folder to lib/firmware etc. but for the life of me i cannot figure out how to grant myself my god-given permission to put the freaking driver in its proper home - bc firmware folder is 'read only access'. i've searched for days online for the answer to this, tried just about every possible answer i've found - and i'm so close to the solution i can almost taste the firmware folder. but at this point its clear i've hit the proverbial. so if anyone would be willing to point a noob in the 'write' direction (i'll see myself out...), a noob would provide their first born in return.
TL;DR: can't put wifi driver in firmware folder bc file system is 'read only' access. tx in advance to anyone w any advice!
7 Replies
if you need to write to read only folder, you need to create custom image afaik, you can start with blue-build if you want to go this route or use ublue template
wow after literal billions of hours searching for this solution, this is the first time i've heard any of this. you'll have to pardon my noobishness here - but are the actions you speak of a straightfoward thing i can look up online? and if not, you know where you can point me in the right direction on how to do these things? i have to ask as more than once now i've self-guided myself into total linux chaos a few times already with this issue. tx for the reply on this -
if you only need to place new file inside immutable folder you can easily do so using https://blue-build.org/, specifically here https://blue-build.org/reference/modules/files/#_top, but if your firmware require dkms or kernel module, you need to package it to kmod or akmod, im not familiar myself you can research more here https://github.com/ublue-os/akmods
thank you!
btw quick searching for sanity check i find this https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware, as per this mapping https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/technical-information/,
/usr/local → /var/usrlocal
you maybe can try putting the file to /var/usrlocal/lib/firmware
that folder is user writable
if that fail you may try custom image route
i wish i could figure out how i caused this, bc everything was working fine for weeks, and at some point while familiarizing myself with my OS i a murdered my wifi - i think via holding a certain key combination when my computer froze up
no. 2 in this list is the folder is the only one i've tried so far - which i only have read only. i'll try the others
just wanted to confirm this solved my problem ! thanks so much!