Solution to Broadcom 43xx Card Problem (12.04 - Precise Pangolin)

[HeyLynx]

Hello,

I have added a broadcom wireless but am having issues with its install and working. Firstly I searched and came up with a few solutions but none have worked.

When I type lspci -vnn | grep 14e4 I get this:
02:02.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4320] (rev 03)

Installing the card in the network icon, the card needed a firmware upgrade. I having tried to downloaded the b43 and b43 legacy drivers at the command prompt but kept asking me to use the installer CD. Then I decided that this was a good time to upgrade to 11.10 of ubuntu. Then on the restart the wireless card is no longer seen in the network icon.

Have tried installing and re-installing both the b43 and b43 legacy drivers, each one at a time and then removing the drivers. This has been with the package manager. Now its still not seen so don't know what to do next.

Hope someone can help.

Have tried the things that mentioned in the 7 posts that mention this card i'm still at a loss.

[brianbotkiller]

thank you guys, this was very useful!

[geoffmurph]

Hi Folks

Your advice would be much appreciated as I am failing miserably to get a Broadcom bcw4306 PCI card to activate under Lubuntu 11.10. The system is recognizing the card as present but 'firmware not installed'. I have tried apt-get fwcutter and firmware-b43legacy-installer, but resolutely no activity (not sure if/how I need to activate these modules, as I'm a bit of a noob)

Many thanks

Geoff

[mauleshjani]

dear do this,

give this command 1st

sudo lspci -v

then... give all these commands... u ll succeed...

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

sudo reboot

================================================== =============================
bye thx

[geoffmurph]

Many thanks for your help. It was a driver issue. I needed to use the legacy B43 driver!

Geoff

[seriesoftubes]

I seem to be having this problem with BCM4313 card. It's working fine whenever I'm right next to the router but when I want to use the computer elsewhere, in my room say, the connection gradually slows down and then grinds to a halt. I have to reload the connection and try to load the webpage as fast as possible. Sometimes the connection stays good for about two minutes before stopping again. I've tried most of the solutions given in this thread but they didn't help much. What else could I do with the driver in order to increase the range that it can actually use my network on?

[23senick]

Try this thread for the 4313 - there are a couple of posts which list the steps

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1889170

Good luck!

[soslug]

I have a Broadcom 4311 on an old Dell 1521 Inspiron Laptop

lspci displays the following

0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

I have not been able to successfully run the STA driver provided with any Ubuntu distribution since 10.04 Desktop LTS which if you are in any doubt it did work. I obtained a pre-release version of 12.04 due for release later this month and was not disappointed when again the Wireless STA driver failed to work.

The solution I came up with involved the editing of modules blacklist in etc and removing and installing some different drivers it is by no means ideal and I hope a resolution can be found for the Wireless STA driver can be incorporated as soon as possible.

First grep to locate the files with the entry Broadcom listed in the files

cat /etc/modprobe.d/* | grep 'bcm'

the problem with this grep is that it does not tell you the file to locate where the driver is listed so instead use this.

grep 'bcm' /etc/modprobe.d/*

Check your system and modify the above command to find the appropriate blacklist used by your system

Edit any files that show bcm43xx with a "#" in front of it and remove the hash so it looks like this:-

bcm43xx

All other modules variants listed can be left alone.

Then open a console and run the following commands

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

As I say its not pretty but at least you can finally use the wireless on the laptop again from Desktop 10.10 to 12.04.

[bohemian9485]

I have a Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad netbook, it comes with Broadcom BCM4313 wireless PCI card. After replacing the original Windows 7 Starter operating system with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid (updated to kernel 2.6.32-40-generic), I lost all the wireless functionality. From Hardware Drivers I was able to install Broadcom STA wireless driver, but obviously it was not the right one:

These package contains Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA wireless driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware.

Issuing lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4 command gave me this:

09:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:4727] (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:0510]

While iwconfig command showed this:

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11  Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Link Quality:5  Signal level:0  Noise level:169
          Rx invalid nwid:0  invalid crypt:2  invalid misc:0

vmnet1    no wireless extensions.

vmnet8    no wireless extensions.

Now my wireless works somehow but it was listed as eth1 device and performance is not satisfactory.

The weird thing is, when I boot up my netbook using Ubuntu 10.10 Oneiric from a USB stick, the installer could correctly identify my Broadcom card model and install the corresponding drivers. Even the BackTrack 5r2 USB installer can do the same thing and I was able to put my wireless card into monitoring mode using airmon-ng.

Now my question is: can I use the drivers from 11.10 version on my 10.04 OS? If so, how?

My conclusion is this is really a kernel problem and the only solution for me is do an OS upgrade. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS just around the corner, I would rather wait for a little longer before I make this decision.

[kwoby]

I have an Acer aspire one 722 with BCM4313 and had a lot of problems; i tried various distributions without success. The only one which works without any tweaking is ubuntu 12.04 beta

I have no problems so far with the 12.04 beta; everything works (did not test the mike.) However I do regularly :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

So get all the improvments until the final versions

greetings
Kwoby