Add wifi firmware to Debian

June 8, 2022

I was sent a new wifi adapter along with some other kit. On Sunday, I had a go at getting this working. So while most of the UK was watching the Jubilee pageant, I was working to get this hardware working on my desktop.

First task, is to work out what the hardware is as detected by the system. Therefore, as root

dmesg – which revealed the hardware for the wifi adapter.

[  493.681212] firmware_class: See https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing firmware
[  493.681216] mt7601u 1-5:1.0: Direct firmware load for mt7601u.bin failed with error -2
[  493.681841] mt7601u: probe of 1-5:1.0 failed with error -2

From this information, I undertook a search for mt7601u.bin on

https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages #search_contents

This revealed I needed package

firmware-misc-nonfree

In order to install this, I needed to edit my sources.list file, in order to add, in non free

cd /etc/apt/ nano sources.list

and append, see where I have added non-free,

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib non-free
#deb-src deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib **non-free**

After doing this:-

Save file
Exit editor

Then to make changes take effect, run:

apt update – re-reads sources list
apt install firmware-misc-nonfree –> to install specified package(s)

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