Lenovo Yoga 2 11" - Fixing Wifi and Bluetooth under Ubuntu 16.04.2

The Lenovo Yoga 2 11" convertible laptop has a compelling form factor and gives a solid impression. Unfortunately it's not a Linux-friendly laptop as far as wireless is concerned. Under Ubuntu 16.04.2 with a very recent 4.8 kernel, the wifi and bluetooth are not working. To add insult to injury, Lenovo has hardcoded the Broadcom wifi and bluetooth card in the UEFI bootloader, so the laptop refuses tot boot with any replacement wifi card I tested.

This post details how I managed to get the Broadcom wifi and bluetooth up and running under Ubuntu 16.04.2. Actually, I'm running KDE Neon which is built on 16.04, but the solution should be the same. I used a simple USB3 ethernet dongle for providing initial wired internet connectivity.

wifi

the following card is installed in my device:

$ lspci -nn | grep -i broad
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01)

steps to support the wifi card:

• deactivate secure boot in the UEFI settings
• install the following packages (run in a terminal)

sudo apt install bcmwl-kernel-source firmware-b43-installer

reference:  https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wireless-drivers

bluetooth

The bluetooth device is known in Linux as:

$ lsusb | grep Bluetooth
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 105b:e065 Foxconn International, Inc. BCM43142A0 Bluetooth module

By default, the firmware is missing due to legal concerns:

$ dmesg | grep -i blueto
[    7.060475] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.21
[    7.060503] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[    7.061584] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[    7.061593] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[    7.061607] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[    7.084378] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: chip id 70
[    7.105106] Bluetooth: hci0: michael-Lenovo-Yoga-2-11
[    7.105112] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM (001.001.011) build 0000
[    7.110415] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM.hcd failed with error -2
[    7.110423] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: Patch **brcm/BCM.hcd not found**

There is a Github repository with recent Broadcom bluetooth firmware files, so you don't have manually extract and convert the relevant files from the usb driver.

Install the BCM.hcd file in a terminal:

$ sudo apt install git
$ cd
$ git clone https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware.git
$ cd broadcom-bt-firmware/brcm
$ ls -l BCM43142A*

Now pick and choose the file that matches the usb device id from the lsusb command above.

$ sudo cp BCM43142A0-105b-e065.hcd /lib/firmware/brcm/BCM.hcd

Finally power off / on your pc -- askubuntu explicitly advises against a simple reboot. In my case a simple modprobe cycle was enough:

$ sudo modprobe -r btusb
$ sudo modprobe btusb

Reference with much more in depth details: https://askubuntu.com/questions/632336/bluetooth-broadcom-43142-isnt-working