Installing firmware blob for Intel Wifi USB pen

Question

I have installed Debian 8/Jessie minimal ISO on my laptop. I get error message during system installation:

Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The firmware can be loaded from removable media, such as a USB stick or floppy.

The missing firmware files are: iwlwifi-7265-9.ucode iwlwifi-7265-8.ucode

If you have media available now, insert it, and continue.

Load missing firmware from removable media?

I found the appropriate firmware on Debian website, downloaded it (zip), extracted to flash drive, and booted with flash drive plugged in. I still get the error message that appropriate firmware could not be found (the error message disappear to fast to copy down). How do I properly format the flash drive? Or is the problem here something else?

Windows Explorer on another computer tells me the flash drive is 14.6GB and formatted as FAT32.

Answer 1

I could swear I had to format the pen to ext2fs last time I installed firmware blobs with the method you describe.

However, you do not need to download/install the firmware from a pen with that process, and in fact I do advise another course of action.

Whilst the booting asks for it, when you have the needed drivers in the Debian repos, the best course of action is installing from there. If you install the firmware from the Debian repositories, it will get accounted for by the package manager and will get updates also. From the security point of view, you also have the added bonus of knowing you are downloading the binaries from a trustworthy source.

In jessie firmware-iwlwifi / non-free the (https://packages.debian.org/jessie/firmware-iwlwifi) package has the iwlwifi-7265-9.ucode iwlwifi-7265-8.ucode firmware files, as it can be searched using https://packages.debian.org/search

You will have to setup the non-freearea if you do not have already in /etc/sources.list

Example:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib  non-free

Then run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi

Then you reboot, and will have the device ready to be setup and used.

Alternatively, if you are not able to connect to the outside (only having an wifi card), you can download the corresponding deb file in another machine, whose link you will find again in https://packages.debian.org/jessie/firmware-iwlwifi

So at the moment, the link points to in debian.org: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-iwlwifi_0.43_all.deb

Then you would copy it over using an USB pen to the linux machine, and install it using:

dpkg -i firmware-iwlwifi_*_all.deb

Finally, reboot.