9.04 -> Dell Inspirion 8600 -> Wireless not working

[Ayuthia]

I hope this works for him, but I'm still troubled by the fact that the card doesn't show up in Jockey. Mine does and it's a BCM4309. I think pretty much the same card as the OP but with 802.11a as well.

For some reason some of the 4306 and 4318 cards are not showing up in Jockey. Hopefully that is the reason for the original poster.

[rajan]

If you currently have a working internet connection in Ubuntu, can you try going into Synaptic and install b43-fwcutter? It will need to download the firmware to cut the portions it needs to make your wireless card work. Once that is complete, you will need to restart your computer and hopefully your wireless card will work. If it doesn't, please post the results of:

dmesg|grep b43

This worked great for me ... i was having the same problems as the OP and i am working on getting my inspiron 8600 set up. adding the 3rd party software, then finding the b43 fwcutter application and installing it worked after a restart. i also installed a few of the updates, so it could have been any of the above that worked (even just a simple reboot, but i doubt it). interestingly, the proprietary drivers like the broadcom driver that i see now in the hardware drivers section was visible while i was using the live CD, but not after i freshly installed 9.04.

in any case, i appreciate the help and i can confirm your advice works!


EDIT:

rajan@saraswati:~$ lspci | grep BCM
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03)