Posts by jim_p

  • [x86-64] LE 12.2 is missing the Broadcom-wl WiFi driver completely

    The day has come! 6.16 just reached debian unstable and wl can not be built for this reason.
    Debian Pastezone

    Is it the same for le too? I am now checking how other distros deal with it.

    I do not really want to quit le about that, so I thought of changing the wifi card. But it is hard to find something that matches the port on the laptop and the available height for it.

    p.s. Thanks for adding "x86-64" to the title, but the "missing the wifi driver completely" is wrong. Other wifi drivers are there, only wl is missing.

  • [x86-64] LE 12.2 is missing the Broadcom-wl WiFi driver completely

    I am one of the "lucky few" who have a broadcom wifi card that works better (if not only) with wl. This is the card in question

    Code
    02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]

    Up until 11, wl was correctly auto selected and the card was working with no extra work

    Code
    02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
       Subsystem: Dell BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
       Kernel driver in use: wl
       Kernel modules: wl, bcma

    On 12.0, NONE of the two was auto selected, so I got no network interface at all


    So I blacklisted bcma, like so

    Code
    echo "blacklist bcma" >> /storage/.config/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf


    and on next boot, wl made it work



    On 12.2 though, wl does not even exist as driver or option, so there is no way to make it work

    The outputs above are from the generic-legacy images for 12.0.2 and 12.2.0, booted in "run mode". Also note that bcma, supposedly, supports the card

    Code
    # modinfo bcma | grep 4359
alias:          pci:v000014E4d00004359sv*sd*bc*sc*i*

    p.s. I also use wl on debian unstable x64 that is the regular os on that laptop, but it is on 6.12, so I can not tell if it compiles or not on 6.16. Hopefully, now that the freeze for debian 13 is over, unstable will move to 6.16 soon and I will know. On that system, I had used b43 the first couple of days, but it has a lot of issues, thus the move to wl.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    Sorry for the huge delay in answering. Now that both the exams and the heatwaves are over, I have some time to answer.

    My main goal is to have a working device with nothing sticking out of it. Ideally, this means reverting it to its original boot loader, which is almost impossible to achieve.

    The second option is to have a stable version of le running on it. But the stable version of le does not contain the wireless driver because its wifi chip is... realtek, so I have to resort to powerline if I chose that solution. That is the current status, now that I made it boot from usb.

    Third option is to use one of your images, since they do contain the driver. But that means using a dev version of le, and very frequent updates.

    If you consider that I want to use it as an iptv device only, I think I have done too much for it but I haven't forgotten anything.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    I really hate this tvbox. Before reading further, please note that, unlike the s805 tvboxes that can boot only from sdcard, the s905 ones can boot from usb too, at least in theory.

    So I downloaded the amlgx aarch64 image for le 12, extracted it and flashed it to a usb stick with dd, changed the line in uenv.ini to this

    Code
    dtb_name=/dtb/meson-gxbb-p201.dtb


    stuck it in usb1 and crossed my fingers. Nothing happened, not even the amlogic boot logo with the tiger showed up. And the same happened on the other usb ports too. If it plays any role, I noticed that the stick's power led takes a few seconds to light up after the tvbox is started.

    Has anything changed since le 11? Because there is no dtb folder in there, just one named amlogic. On the other hand though, the sdcard which does have le 12, also has the same line in uenv.ini and has a dtb folder and it boots just fine. But that is le 11 UPGRADED to le 12.

    That led me to change the above line to

    Code
    dtb_name=/amlogic/meson-gxbb-p201.dtb


    and, low and behold, it booted... after like 2-3 minutes of being "stuck" in the le and kodi splash screens! It even popped that systemd error message about ethmactool-config.service.

    So what do I do now?

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    Although I do use wl with debian and 6.12 currently, I know what you mean, I see it on the package's changelog. But that is not my concern here.

    I want to know if the tvbox, with the altered boot configuration etc because of le, will boot from a usb stick. Will it?

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    I am really sorry for bringing this to the surface after ~1 year of inactivity, but I decided to throw in the towel with restoring the original firmware.

    After 1 year of countless tries, on different systems, with different versions of amlogic burn tool (even the bash script for linux), different versions of drivers, different cables (even homemade ones) and a few powered usb hubs, I have concluded that this bit the reason of all those failures

    Code
    [   26.557209] usb 3-2: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[   26.695720] usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1b8e, idProduct=c003, bcdDevice= 0.07
[   26.695739] usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
[   27.969026] usb 3-2: USB disconnect, device number 2

    Every single time, the device is disconnected after less than 1 second and nothing can be done afterwards. And this happens ONLY for usb1, as if all the other ports are dead.

    So here is the question. I want to remove the sd card completely. If I flash a new img on a usb stick and put it on the tvbox, will it boot without any extra work or not?

  • Empty list under "Available Versions"

    I changed the vm's vga to "vmsvga", enabled 3d acceleration and maxed its video memory to 128mb. The best thing it managed to do is to show libreelec's splash screen, followed by 4-5 failed attempts to start xorg and then a reboot.
    What is worse, while the vm could not start xorg, it was keeping the mouse captured, so I had no way to close it. I switched to a tty and force-closed it with

    Code
    vboxmanage controlvm LibreELEC poweroff

    Le 12 on virtualbox: does not work, many issues, would not recommend, 1 star :P

    As for the original issue that I opened the thread, it seems to still be present as you can see in the screenshots below.

  • Empty list under "Available Versions"

    Quote from tokul

    lspci shows that libreelec/linux recognizes video card as VMWare SVGA II adapter.

    The lspci output above says that it is a virtualbox vga. So, if there is no driver for it in the supplied ova file, this means it is incompatible with virtualbox. If this is really the case, I would like it to be mentioned somewhere, like the generic image states "no nvidia support" in parentheses.

    As for the hijacking, I opened this thread a year ago and my issue was that le could not run properly on vmware... because it had no free space to do anything and, as the dev said, it was an issue with the ova file. I remembered it when I decided to try le 12 in a vm, but I was hoping it was fixed, because the pull request was indeed merged. I am now downloading gparted to check its size.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    I learned about brcm80211 and its family of drivers (brcmfmac and brcmsmac) a few days ago, because I thought it was either b43 or wl for the broadcoms. I guess I am the lucky one whose cards are supported by neither of the brcm80211 family. And if I recall correctly, I had asked in the past for le to include b43 instead of wl.

    My problem is how this (wireless card on an 15 year old laptop I use with an old x64 version of le, so older kernel)

    Code
    04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
       Subsystem: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:04b5]
       Kernel driver in use: wl
       Kernel modules: wl


    runs better than this (wireless card on a 9-10 year old laptop I set up a week ago with debian unstable and 6.9.8 today)

    Code
    02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]
       Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0014]
       Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
       Kernel modules: bcma


    On this laptop, which I will use until the end of summer probably, I have to select between a poor performing b43 or a wl that gives a kernel panic on boot. Last update for the wl driver, for fixing compatibilities or builds with the kernels was on March 4th 2024, so it is pretty fresh.

    As for the rpi... don't get me started. A few years ago, when I first got my hands on a 4gb rpi4, I had commented on the lack of a purely arm64 os from the rpi foundation and how dhcpcd is insufficient. Oh what a blasphemy that was for the fanboys! Fast forward to today and to rpi5, there is finally an arm64 image, although not fully 64bit (it has 32bit userspace as someone said) and dhcpcd was ditched in favor of network manager.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    Are you sure? Because I am pretty sure even le 12 uses wl for the broadcom chips,

    My issue it is not libreelec related though. The kernel panic brought back memories from that tvbox and I said "omg please do not have the same chip with the tvbox"! The only hardware I have used extensively and has a broadcom wifi chipset is my rpi3b, and its wifi is... bad, plain and simple.

  • Installing on old S905 TV box

    Please excuse my semi-offtopic. May I ask what wifi chip my tvbox had? Please don't say broadcom :D

    Excluding my rpi3b, this is the first time I come accross a broadcom wifi chip (bcm43228). It peforms like trash with b43, with the download speeds maxing at 300kb/s. It performs perfectly with wl, but it gets a kernel panic on boot.

    Regular x64 distro installation.

  • LibreELEC (Omega) 12 Beta1

    No, it is about x64, the generic-legacy img and my old laptop. Sorry for not mentioning it.

    The le 11 issue with wifi is/was platform independant though. I faced it on the nightlies of le 11 from May to September of 2022 on my rpi3b+, until I gave up completely on le there.

  • LibreELEC (Omega) 12 Beta1

    Thank you for the new release. I just downloaded it and I am testing it now.

    As it seems, it still has the same issue with wifi that le 11 had, because iwd and connman could not work well together. Instead of rebooting until it works, which is what I did on le 11, this time I tried disabling and re-enabling it from le settings. The first time it started after 2 or 3 tries. This time I have already tried 9 or 10, but it still does not come up, so I connected via ethernet to ssh to it, get logs etc.

    So, what should I include on the new thread I am about to open?