Install from image on Pi Zero 2 W disables(or fails to install drivers/firmware) wifi card

Josmopolitan

I've tried to install RetroPie 4.7.1 with Raspberry Pi Image v1.6.2 and v1.7.1 both using advanced customization options and completely vanilla. After imaging an SD card, I experience the same behaviors on Zero 2 W, and that is the wlan0 device does not exist and I am unable to configure it on through the shell.

There are a few different problems, the first is that no country code is set for the lan device. If I try to configure it in raspi-config through the localisation options, raspi-config returns that there is no wlan interface to configure a country code for.

iwconfig returns no wlan devices.

after editing the wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/network/interfaces and rebooting, there is no wlan0 device.

Adding the country code to wpa_supplicant.conf and manually setting the locale to en_US.UTF-8, there is still no wlan0 device.

After making all those changes, trying to ifup wlan0 or manually start wpasupplicant returns failure messages, specifically a wpasupplicant daemon fails to start, return code 1, among other failures.

I have also tried iterations of iw get and iw set to switch the country to US, which it does, but doesn't correct anything.

I have tried the RPI 1/ZERO image and the RPI 2/3 image, and both exhibit the same behaviors.

Josmopolitan

I have confirmed it is not a hardware issue, as I am able to get wifi on Rasbian OS Lite and Octopi with this device and have experienced the same issue on 2 separate Zero 2 W boards. I do not have the same issue on the Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Additionally, I attempted to manually install Retropie over an installation of Rasbian OS Lite using the instructions on this site's documentation and received a large number of cascading failures. I was able to get into the retropie setup menu, but received more cascading failures within. I may have missed a step somewhere, but it ran the install for hours and I had to wipe and start over because it went so pear-shaped.

sleve_mcdichael

For Zero 2W, you want to use the recent Pi 3 weekly build. Looks like they're labeling it with zero2w now, even: https://files.retropie.org.uk/images/weekly

https://files.retropie.org.uk/images/weekly/retropie-buster-4.7.20-rpi2_3_zero2w.img.gz

@josmopolitan said in Install from image on Pi Zero 2 W disables(or fails to install drivers/firmware) wifi card:

Additionally, I attempted to manually install Retropie over an installation of Rasbian OS Lite using the instructions on this site's documentation and received a large number of cascading failures.

RetroPie is not compatible with the latest Raspbian "Bullseye." You can use the legacy "Buster" OS if you want to install RetroPie manually (this is what's on the downloadable images already): https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-legacy

https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_oldstable_lite_armhf/images/raspios_oldstable_lite_armhf-2022-01-28/2022-01-28-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.zip

Josmopolitan

@sleve_mcdichael this worked perfectly. Thank you! Hopefully this makes its way up to imager soon.