How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

[ZombiekE]

Ok, I've solved this... it seems Ubuntu needs "sudo modprobe bcm43xx" every time it starts.

[lyceum]

For those with 4311, I re-installed edgy & tried ndiswrapper (yes I know I did not need to and it was dumb, but I was willing to try anything at that point) and my WiFi was gone. Edgy could no longer find it. Do not try that page. If you can't get this to work, I would recomend you get a new card.

[llimllib]

So, it kind of works for me. I can connect and use the internet at first (edgy eft, same card as you) but the connection zonks out every 2 minutes or so. Sometimes for 10 seconds, sometimes for 10 minutes.

It makes the system unusable.

Anybody have any suggestions?

[LinLenLap]

I just did a clean install of Edgy on a Lenovo 3000 c100. Under 6.06 lspci showed me having a broadcom 4318 or 4311...I can't recall which. Now it shows up as a Broadcom dell 1420 or something like that. Very odd.

Anyway, this guide works better than ever for me!

From a clean install I installed fwcutter, then dowloaded the wlapsto.o file, then copied the firmware to lib/firmware and the kernel directory. Then rebooted. I then booted up, entered my password, and Bam!

I mean, I'm using WAP-PSK and no problems. Amazing. I'd vote again, but apparently it remembers me having success with this under dapper.

Best,

LLL

[baluchi]

Hello everyone,

I have a PC with Linksys WMP54G PCI card and a laptop with a Linksys WPC54G PCMCIA card. They both use the Broadcom 4306 chipset.

Following the tutorial on Ubuntu 6.06, they both worked fine using the wl_apsta.o driver provided, however after updating Ubuntu (apt-get upgrade), they both stopped working.

My router used the WEP 128bit encryption.

On my PC (Gnome), I had to redo the whole tutorial plus the following to get it to work:

sudo modprobe bcm43xx

On my laptop (server mode - ie terminal only) I had to edit /etc/network/interfaces manually to look like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
        wireless-essid <myessid>
        address 192.168.2.21
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.2.1
        wireless-key <mykey>
auto eth0

For DHCP, it can just look like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0

However, after the upgrade, I started getting this error message (James, are you listenning? ):

ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP) : eth0: link is not ready

So I had to enter:

sudo iwconfig eth0 ap any

every time I boot.

Instead of re-typing these commands on every boot, I edited the /etc/rc.local to include the commands (without sudo) before the line where it says exit 0.

In both cases, I also added:

iwconfig eth0 rate 54M

to the same file so that the higher speed is used.

I hope this helps some, but I recommend anyone posting his problem to include the outputs of:
sudo iwconfig
sudo iwconfig
sudo iwlist scan
cat /etc/network/interfaces
plus any error message he encounters if related to his problem.

Thank you everyone for your help.

[ZombiekE]

I have a Broadcom 4318 in Edgy Eft. I need to write "sudo modprobe bcm43xx" every time I start Ubuntu. After a few hours of use (sometimes not many), I have to do it again, but sometimes when I re-do it it doesn't work unless I reboot the laptop. What can I do?

Is anybody else having this issue?

[benbruscella]

With Edgy, my wireless connection seems to go down after a while.

Then, when I try to reboot, I get:

bcm43xx: Controller RESET (Tx Timeout)

And this means I cannot shutdown/reboot without a power down.

Anyone else seeing this?

benb@zigzag:~$ sudo iwlist scan
lo        Interface doesn't support scanning.

eth0      Interface doesn't support scanning.

eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:11:24:0A:34:F5
                    ESSID:"home"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
                    Mode:Master
                    Channel:3
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
                              11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
                              48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Quality=100/100  Signal level=-71 dBm  
                    IE: WPA Version 1
                        Group Cipher : TKIP 
                        Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP 
                        Authentication Suites (1) : PSK  
                    Extra: Last beacon: 348ms ago
          Cell 02 - Address: 00:14:6C:D0:27:38
                    ESSID:"MAGGIE"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
                    Mode:Master
                    Channel:11
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
                              11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
                              48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Quality=100/100  Signal level=-30 dBm  
                    Extra: Last beacon: 4ms ago

sit0      Interface doesn't support scanning.

benb@zigzag:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

[OneSeventeen]

I tried the original instructions to a T, then when that didn't work, I tried using the wireless drivers I used in the past to get it to work with Dapper.

Still no luck with Edgy.

Here's the requested output:

oneseventeen@tigershark:~$ sudo iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"Calvary"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.484 GHz  Access Point: Invalid   
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=19 dBm   
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

sit0      no wireless extensions.

oneseventeen@tigershark:~$ sudo iwlist scan
lo        Interface doesn't support scanning.

eth0      Interface doesn't support scanning.

eth1      No scan results
sit0      Interface doesn't support scanning.

oneseventeen@tigershark:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces 
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback


iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth2
iface eth2 inet dhcp

auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp


auto eth0

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid Calvary
wireless-key s:

auto eth1

Any tips? Or should I go the ndiswrapper route, or possibly downgrade to Dapper?

This is my business laptop and I can't believe I was so eager to upgrade that I didn't give it time and check into the potential issues... I just remember using fwcutter to get wireless working in dapper and it was so easy.

[OneSeventeen]

I followed these instructions and just like this thread mentioned, I installed the fwcutter script, but after extracting the firmware from the file linked to in this thread, and the file I used last time to get it to work with ndiswrapper, I wound up just running the fwcutter script:

sudo /usr/share/bcm43xx-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh

I had to plug into a wired network for it to download the .so file and extract the firmware for me.

My wireless adapter still didn't work, so I manually edited the interfaces file to tell the interface to operate at 11M

wireless-rate 11M

I disabled all wireless networking whether that be from network-manager-gnome or network configuration, then rebooted, and it still didn't work.

So, I wound up just manually typing in

sudo iwconfig eth1 essid Calvary

and it actually connected!

If there are any config files or command line argument results I can attach here to help anyone else with the issue, just ask and I'll post it.

(I'm now setting up a webserver on my laptop for development purposes over the now-working wireless!!! only 2 minutes remaining )

[ag65151]

Worked like a champ on my HP pavilion ze5500. I came over to Ubuntu from FC. I was tired of banging my head against a brick wall to get my hw working. Thank you for this how-to.