[Technology] Installing Fedora 22, again: wireless Internet and resizing file systems

I have a 24GB SSD and a 500GB HDD in my computer.



A few months ago, every time my computer hibernated or slept, my file system on my SSD got corrupted, and I had to fsck it to repair it.  I ended up just creating a new partition on my HDD and installing my OS there.



Recently, I've grown reckless, and decided I wanted to have my OS on the SSD after all.  I did some SMART tests and my SSD seems to be fine, so pretending to forget about the earlier drama, I reformatted the SSD and re-installed Fedora 22.

Wireless Internet

Of course, the Internet doesn't work out of the box.  That's because of Broadcom's proprietary drivers and firmware.  Previously, I used the wl driver, using akmod-wl and kmod-wl.  My device:

03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n

I looked at the open source driver, b43, though, and it claimed to now support it(!).  I apparently needed the firmware from the Windows driver, though.  Sigh.  Indeed, journalctl --system (instead of dmesg) reported this:

[  162.191310] b43-phy0: Broadcom 43228 WLAN found (core revision 30)

[  162.191764] b43-phy0: Found PHY: Analog 9, Type 4 (N), Revision 16

[  162.191776] b43-phy0: Found Radio: Manuf 0x17F, ID 0x2057, Revision 9, Version 1

[  162.192544] Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PMNLS ]

[  162.192570] b43 bcma0:1: Direct firmware load for b43/ucode30_mimo.fw failed with error -2

[  162.192596] b43 bcma0:1: Direct firmware load for b43/ucode30_mimo.fw failed with error -2

[  162.192995] b43 bcma0:1: Direct firmware load for b43-open/ucode30_mimo.fw failed with error -2

[  162.193015] b43 bcma0:1: Direct firmware load for b43-open/ucode30_mimo.fw failed with error -2

[  162.193019] b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode30_mimo.fw" not found

[  162.193022] b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode30_mimo.fw" not found

[  162.193024] b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website.

This lead me to http://linuxwireless.sipsolutions.net/en/users/Drivers/b43/#Fedora, which has a broken link to http://linuxwireless.sipsolutions.net/en/users/Drivers/b43#other_distros further down the page.





In the end, I had to do these things

$ dnf install b43-fwcutter wget     # dnf instead of yum

$ export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"

$ wget http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2

$ tar xjf broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2

$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o

$ modprobe b43

And it worked.

Mounting encrypted /home partition

I cheated and used gnome-disks to make my encrypted /home partition auto-mount.  Sorry.