Lou's Clues

Archive for April, 2012

Recently I decided to take my Dell XPS M1210 laptop and wipe Windows 7 from it and install Ubuntu 11.10. During the time I’ve had this laptop getting the Broadcom wireless card to work with various flavors of Linux (fedora, debian etc.) has always proven interesting. In an attempt to help stream line the process in the future and also in hopes of helping others I decided to post the steps that I took to get the Broadcom 4311 card running.

1. Determine the card you have running

    sudo lspci -nn | grep Broadcom 

            0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)

2. Connect up to your network via CAT5 Cable
3. Update apt-get

    sudo apt-get update

4. Install correct driver

    sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

5. Remove incorrect driver, if present

    sudo apt-get remove bcml-kernel-source

6. Search for blacklist bcm43xx entry in Modprobe

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

7. If it is present edit the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file

    sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

8. Search for bcm by typing /bcm place a # before the line so new line will read

    #blacklist bcm43xx

9. Save file and quit

    :wq!

10.  Remove the Broadcom STA Wireless driver from the Additional Drivers Reboot

11.   Reboot

This is what it took to get mine working. Yours may or may not need all the steps. I’ve read that the same can be accomplished through the Ubuntu Software Center by searching for BCM and installing the aforementioned packages. I did not try this but you can feel free to. Hope this helps as I had to search multiple sites to compile these steps.