How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

[slooksterpsv]

I did the same thing I've been doing before and it still works. Ubuntu just needs more support on getting these things working instead of a work-around.

[nickm]

For anyone that is having problems, try this:

 modprobe bcm43xx

and reboot

[nickm]

The device shows up, but no essids show up when i try to configure. ifconfig shows that it is installed and should be working.

Has anyone else ran into this problem?

can you try this:

 iwconfig

and post what you see?
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hey i got this message when moving the files into the firmware folder:

*****: Sorry, it's not posible to extract "bcm43xx_microcode11.fw".
*****: Extracting firmware from an old driver is bad. Choose a more recent one.
*****: Luckily bcm43xx driver doesn't include microcode11 uploads at the moment.*****: But this can be added in the future...

and my wireless doesnt work, i get an ip but no net and cant connect to router

hmm, i dont quite know what to make of this, i got that same error and mine works... i dont understand how you have an IP assigned to you from your router but you cant connect.. can you go to System > Administration > networking and see if your card is disabled on that menu? it should be.
Also clear out the values on the DNS tab too. hope that helps
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But when I tried to connect, using Wireless Assistant

Try network manager

I saw another post of problems with this wireless device when the system has >1GB of RAM. Is there any merit to that?

Doubtful, i dont think RAM will effect anything in that way

[crag277]

I'm using KDE, so I installed knetworkmanager, but still no luck. It still does not find any availible wireless networks. However when I manually tell it to connect to my network it must see it, because the progress bar gets stuck at 28% and says something like "Configuring Device". I'm at work now and don't remember exactly. It stays like this for ome time, during which the wired connection doesn't work either. Then, after some kind of timeout I assume, the blue wireless light goes off, then comes back on, and the process starts over again. The only way to end it is to quit KNetoworkManager.

[Swad]

Good guide and all very simple compared to to some of the previous beta guides for Dapper. That said, though, it doesn't actually work for me. In previous guides it said you couldn't have a protected WAP (ie: encryption) enabled when trying to connect. Is this still the case? There's no way I'm taking down our corporate security on our WAP just for this. This is a step backwards and uncalled for. ndiswrapper worked great for me in Breezy, but this seems like step backwards.

Honestly, it seems like networking in general with Dapper took a step or two back... or at least does it in totally new ways. The /etc/network/interfaces file seems to do nothing at all anymore. Even things such as activating and deactivating interfaces through the gnome Networking GUI only half works.

I'm still going to beat on this a bit more, but I'm about to throw in the towel as things that used to work for me one way before with network suddenly doing their own thing now and I can't seem to control the setup of my networking config. Wireless acts like it works (looking and TX/RX info on ifconfig) and the settings seem right with iwconfig, but nothing actually works.

UGH!

[trivialpackets]

A big thanks from me. But a question. Is there a reason this is better than ndiswrapper? I had tried to get this going using the wiki and for whatever reason failed on RC. I did reinstall of LTS after messing with Suse for my father in law, and this worked perfectly. Great How To. Now I just need a how to for getting gfxboot to work right.

[marlobello]

This is a great how-to with one major problem. You must have a network connection to get a network connection (apt-get fwcutter). Can you install this package for distro discs?

[rjstevens3]

$iwconfig
lo...

eth1 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:off/any Nickname: "Broadcom 4318"
Mode: Managed Frequency=2.437 GHz Access Point: Invalid
Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power=18dBm
RTS thr:off Fragment thr: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

eth0.....

[unicycler]

I've been fighting with this for the past two days now, but it is almost all fixed thanks to you. My only remaining problem is that now, every time I restart, I need to sudo modprobe bcm43xx. Is there any way to get this command to run during the boot process?

[pspowell]

Thanks for a great guide!

I had just finished setting up NetworkManager not 10 minutes before this showed up on Digg. Sometimes, as in my case, the NetworkManager install isn't quite flawless, but I found this link which walked me thru the install. It's on the Ubuntu wiki at :https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkManager