how do I switch broadcom driver? this one is quirky/slow; streaming music freq. stops

[jzacsh]

I just installed 9.10 on my girlfriend's Dell Inspiron which has Broadcom Wireless drivers. Everything works great, except wireless (and except mic input, but I'll post about that later if need be).

I used this testing thread to solve my problem:
ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1288865 which has you load a driver off the Live CD.

Everything seems to be working with wireless, except
it gets to be quirky/slow/stuck intermittently.

For instance, if I'm streaming music (either via browser to last.fm or via rhythm box plugin or via browser to pandora.com) the buffer just gets stuck, which hasn't *ever* happened on any computer. Then, while its getting stuck and says "buffering", I'll go to a browser to try and load another page and the connection seems to be stuck. sometimes this "stuck" lasts a minute or so. If I'm reading mail in gmail, I also experience a lot of hanging when this is happening.

Even weirder is (idk how this is *possibly* related to my NIC) I get ?DNS? errors: I'll get redirected to optimum.com search results, as if I typed in a bogus domain name -- yet what I typed was "linux.com"! Is that not a DNS related thing and just always happens on a slow connection?

Any suggestions?
If no one has any suggestions for me to try, then I guess I'll just try a different driver? (if there is a different one)
-- what commands should I run to see exactly what I have?

lspci | grep -i broadcom
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)

All help is appreciated! (I'd hate to have to give up and give her Windows 7 on here!)

[bkratz]

I think if you are having issues you may want to look into this

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hlight=BCM4318

[jzacsh]

I think if you are having issues you may want to look into this

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hlight=BCM4318

Wow, this work looks awesome! From the responses and it being open sourced -- I'll try it tomorrow

[bkratz]

Wow, this work looks awesome! From the responses and it being open sourced -- I'll try it tomorrow

Please come back and let us know if it works and how well, if it does remember to mark the thread solved in the thread tools so that others can find it and benefit.

[jzacsh]

Okay, I hadn't tried anything since I left this last post, because I hadn't any problems. Now I'm having them again. Specifically, I can say two things:

• I'm getting weird DNS issues
• I can't seem to keep a proper stream of even SSH connections (be it to my own schools servers, or my own ubuntu server in the house) -- I just get intermittent (and very frequent) freezes.

I'd be glad to switch my driver, but I'd really like to at least *try* trouble shooting, does any one else have any ideas?

-------
to elaborate on the above list of issues:

• I'm getting weird DNS issues
  I frequently get redirected to my ISP's "domain not found" search-pages, eg:
  http://domainnotfound.optimum.net/ca...ain=google.com
  
  -- now I *know* google.com exists, so something's wrong. Someone told me to try looking at my file /etc/resolv.conf, however that shouldn't be an issue because it was automatically built by the network manager. Here it is any way:
  

  # Generated by NetworkManager
  domain 532
  search 532
  nameserver 192.168.0.1

• can't stream SSH connections
  -- its so unreliable that I don't even use it from this laptop, any more because its rendered useless (which I've not experienced coming from even the slowest machines).

Again, thanks for any help or any ideas!

[jzacsh]

Switching to the FLOSS driver didn't work, I'm still having issues and its often bad enough that I can't efficiently concentrate on a task, because I'll get stuck at "domain not found"s.

I would love to feed off someone's experience if anyone's got an idea to share

[northd_tech]

lspci | grep -i broadcom
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)

Yours is a Broadcom 4312 (which is actually close to a 4311 as I understand it). The 4318 is something of a quirky beast under ubuntu.

Have you done a search at this forum for "broadcom 4312" or "broadcom STA"? There should be several threads about the proprietary STA driver that claims to be written specifically for the 4311 and 4312 (as well as my Broadcom 4321AG, and it has worked pretty well for me, but has been slower lately). Some of those threads should have a link where you can download the STA driver directly from Broadcom.com.

I have read of there being issues where IPv6 is causing slow connections with the Broadcom wireless interfaces (and suspect that is my recent problem).

[jzacsh]

Yours is a Broadcom 4312 (which is actually close to a 4311 as I understand it). The 4318 is something of a quirky beast under ubuntu.

Have you done a search at this forum for "broadcom 4312" or "broadcom STA"? There should be several threads about the proprietary STA driver that claims to be written specifically for the 4311 and 4312 (as well as my Broadcom 4321AG, and it has worked pretty well for me, but has been slower lately). Some of those threads should have a link where you can download the STA driver directly from Broadcom.com.

I have read of there being issues where IPv6 is causing slow connections with the Broadcom wireless interfaces (and suspect that is my recent problem).

Hey, thanks a bunch for the response.

I believe the driver you're talking about is the one that was automatically installed with my system (from the CD I put in). But either way, I went ahead and downloaded that ^ and was going to try it -- but then I saw my "hardware drivers" dialogue box and noticed it says "STA". I believe the STA driver you're talking about for 4312 is what I already have, see my attached screen-shot. Should I post the output of any specific commands, to show you?

PS. The last thing I did was followed this tutorial (which I found in a forum, recommended to me in this thread).

[northd_tech]

Yes, that is the STA driver that I meant jzac. Are you sure you got the correct version (32 vs. 64 bit)?

Let's see the output of these terminal commands:

uname -a

lsmod

ifconfig

iwconfig

sudo lshw -C network

sudo iwlist scan

Did you follow the readme.txt from that Broadcom website? It worked really well for my 64-bit under Jaunty 9.04- maybe this problem is specific to Karmic 9.10.

edit: If you search the forum for "ipv6 slow" you should find some recent threads about the IPv6 problem. Some have mentioned switching to OpenDNS as a workaround for similar problems to what you described above. I'm still trying to get my wireless connection faster (it is much more reliable since I killed IPv6 with some kernel options in my GRUB menu.lst).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS

Some have also mentioned pointing your DNS at google's DNS servers (but I think google is evil personally).

http://scroogle.org/

[wojox]

For bcm wireless load :

sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source