Can't do anything related to wlan0 (Alpine Linux, Raspberry PI 3 B+)

Question

I just bought a Raspberry PI 3 B+ some weeks ago, and I decided to install Alpine Linux due to it uses OpenRC and one friend of me recommended it to me.

I have installed it only as diskless mode, because I want to connect it to my WiFi and then finish the installation comfortably. I have to say that I have only a basic understanding on how WiFi networks works, and just tried to connect via command line one time before.

Well, I installed wpa_supplicant and wireless-network tools and then I tried this:

ip link set wlan0 up
iwlist wlan0 scanning

And this is when the first error appears:

wlan0    Interface doesn't support scanning : Interrupted system call

So I do:

iw wlan0 link

But it returns me:

Not connected.

Well, let's say we can ignore this (I guess not), my /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file goes like this:

network={
    ssid="MY_CORRECT_WIFI_NAME"
    psk="12345678"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

But when I run:

wpa_supplicant -B -D wext -i wlan0 -C /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

It doesn't work (again, probably because of that not connected shown before).

What should I do?

My wlan0 driver is brcmfmac.

Please tell me if you need me to show more information.

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

You need to install the firmware for this to work.

On my Raspberry Pi 3B+, I placed these on the SD card in

/firmware/brcm/

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/tree/master/brcm

• brcmfmac43455-sdio.txt
• brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin
• brcmfmac43455-sdio.clm_blob

Then it worked as expected. Whew, it took a lot of surfing to figure that.