Page 1 of 1

No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:33 am
by lilitalian
Hi all,

Got an RPi 3B for Christmas and found time to try and set it up finally. Apparently it comes with a WiFi chip but I've been having lots of trouble setting it up. When I do ifconfig -a I only see lo eth0, and there's no wlan0 interface. I tried to modprobe brcmfmac brcmutil cfg80211 but to no avail, and dmesg doesn't return anything helpful :/ Also I tried using ethernet to update the system (hoping there would be firmware updates) and it connected/updated fine, but that didn't do anything to solve the wifi problem. Any suggestions? I'm fairly comfortable with Linux/Arch but this just perplexes me. I think it has something to do with the kernel modules but I'm not totally sure. Everywhere I've looked on the Internet so far has lead to a dead end or hasn't worked :(

Any help would be appreciated!

Re: No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 7:46 am
by jamesh
Install a fresh Raspbian with Pixel. When clicked, does the WIfi icon top right give a list of available access points?

Re: No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:04 pm
by lilitalian
Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, it does. Well at least it's not a hardware issue then. Maybe I should just use Raspbian for the time being? I'd really like to be able to use Arch at some point though.

Re: No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:14 pm
by fruitoftheloom
lilitalian wrote:Hi all,

Got an RPi 3B for Christmas and found time to try and set it up finally. Apparently it comes with a WiFi chip but I've been having lots of trouble setting it up. When I do ifconfig -a I only see lo eth0, and there's no wlan0 interface. I tried to modprobe brcmfmac brcmutil cfg80211 but to no avail, and dmesg doesn't return anything helpful :/ Also I tried using ethernet to update the system (hoping there would be firmware updates) and it connected/updated fine, but that didn't do anything to solve the wifi problem. Any suggestions? I'm fairly comfortable with Linux/Arch but this just perplexes me. I think it has something to do with the kernel modules but I'm not totally sure. Everywhere I've looked on the Internet so far has lead to a dead end or hasn't worked :(

Any help would be appreciated!
WiFi is supported so maybe you are running an old version of ArchLinuxArm ??

Or maybe you have not updated with the latest kernel /firmware, Arch being a rolling release it updates frequently ??

Code: Select all

sudo pacman -Syu
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv ... berry-pi-3

Re: No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:20 pm
by lilitalian
Yes that was the first thing I did, I plugged it into ethernet and updated it. I got the tar file right off the ArchArm site so it should be the most recent one :/

EDIT: Wait was I supposed to use the ArchLinuxArm-rpi-2-latest.tar.gz? There's some contradictory info there on the site

Re: No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:37 pm
by fruitoftheloom
lilitalian wrote:Yes that was the first thing I did, I plugged it into ethernet and updated it. I got the tar file right off the ArchArm site so it should be the most recent one :/

EDIT: Wait was I supposed to use the ArchLinuxArm-rpi-2-latest.tar.gz? There's some contradictory info there on the site

ArchlinuxArm expect a user to create a SD Card using a Linux System and yes they use the same ARMv7 AArch32 release for Raspberry Pi 2B & 3B

Unless you want to try the experimental ARMv8 AArch64 release !!

Re: No wireless interface on RPi3

Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 7:50 pm
by lilitalian
Oh ok so I went to their Downloads page and downloaded the package under ARMv8 Raspberry Pi 3 (ArchLinuxARM-rpi-3-latest.tar.gz) originally. I guess I'll try the package under ARMv7 Raspberry Pi 2 then? Ugh sorry I'm dumb :roll: