Jaunty Broadcom (BCM4328) Wireless Problem

**nexusnode** · April 24th, 2009

Hi all,

appear to be having a problem with my laptop's wireless now I have just installed 9.04. 8.10 also had a problem, but only showed itself when connective to WPA2 networks. 8.04 on the other hand worked flawlessly. In this version though, the problem appears to have gotten worse - now the network manager can't see my wireless card at all!

So...

The machine is an HP tx1340ea, with a Broadcom BCM4328 network controller.

Its a bit weird, I was actually posting a problem report but then I was going through the steps in various troubleshooting threads to try and give some useful information and it started working!

The sequence of events since I installed it fresh this time round was:
I uninstalled the Broadcom STA wireless driver, restarted, used the switch on the front to turn the wireless card off, restarted, used the same switch to turn it back on, restarted, reinstalled the Broadcom STA wireless driver, restarted. Hey-presto! It appears to be working.

It even seems to still work after multiple normal reboots!

Hope this is helpful to someone, if anyone has a logical explanation for this I would also love to hear it!

**Ambivalent** · April 24th, 2009

I have the same issue and what you did fixed it for me as well!

In windows that would have been the first thing I tried... I don't tend to think that way when using Linux...

**ataris_kid** · April 24th, 2009

Thanks a ton dude, I just had the same issue and this worked. Kind of a silly fix.. I'd like to know the logic behind this as well!

**chmorgan** · April 24th, 2009

I submitted a bug for this issue, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/365857 with the hope that a fix that doesn't require rebooting will be found. I may try out the rebooting technique but I'm not sure that I'm properly uninstalling the driver since I'm using the kubuntu hardware driver manager jockey.

**chmorgan** · April 24th, 2009

From this thread, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=880218 I tried the fix that someone recommended of:

sudo rmmmod ssb
sudo modprobe wl

And bam, the wireless device started showing up in the network management plasmoid and I'm able to connect and use wireless. I don't know how to ensure that this happens after rebooting though.

**chmorgan** · April 24th, 2009

To clarify, this lets wifi work for me but I'm not sure if this is using the "broadcom sta wireless driver" listed in the hardware driver manager, it may be using the default kernel drivers for broadcom chips so it may not be equivalent at all to the originally suggested fix in this thread.

**chrono310** · April 26th, 2009

Wow, thanks! This worked for me. So many reboots, though...

**Matoridi** · April 30th, 2009

Well.... Deinstalling and reinstalling the driver (after all those reboots) worked for my HP DV2620 laptop!

Thanks nexusnode!

**itnet7** · May 7th, 2009

Thanks nexusnode! You saved me a call to Dell tech support, I am confirming that this fix works with a Dell XPS 1730 with a BCM4328 802.11a/b/g/n card as well! This is under Jaunty, but it's important to note that I had also tried booting into a live cd environment for 8.10 and it wasn't working by default there as well.
This forum post also restored connectivity, but yours seems more permanent!

Thanks so much for taking the time and posting this.

Chris C.
itnet7
#ubuntu-us-fl

**WolfWitch** · May 18th, 2009

I had this same problem with a Dell Latitude D430. It was driving me crazy since this is the first time in probably two years I've actually had wireless problems with Ubuntu.

The multiple reboot/on-off wireless switch combinations posted here didn't work for me, but installing b43-fwcutter did the trick. I just installed it via Synaptic, rebooted, and now wireless works flawlessly. No idea why this wasn't a problem in Hardy.(!)