[Just a quick post to get info in one place, sorry!]

Info

I have a GPD Pocket:

  • running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
  • with a BCM4356 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (PCI ID 14e4:43ec)

with some issues:

  • It appears like only 2.4GHz networks are being detected, and not 5GHz networks. That being said, our router is dual-band and I can’t see either network.
  • Attempting to connect to a random 2.4GHz network crashes the network manager (WiFi icon/settings entry disappears, then reappears after a few seconds).
  • dmesg doesn’t seem to contain anything relevant, apart from maybe:
    • /usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/netplan failed with exit status 1.
  • Connecting a phone over USB and using USB tethering was working fine when this all started, but that seems to have stopped working too now (:

Updates

  1. Did the country code change and rebooted, now is displaying 5GHz networks (or at least, my network…) — attempting to connect to it still crashes the network manager.

Resolution!!!

With some prompting by a littlefox, I dug through journalctl -f a bit deeper and found references to stable-ssid being an invalid macaddress for a given network (i.e. a yaml file in /etc/netplan) — at this point I was getting pissed off so I just rm /etc/netplan/*.yaml and retried connecting to a network… which worked.

Notes for me

Change brcmfmac4356-pcie.gpd-win-pocket.txt country code