Broadcom 43xx Chipset and Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwahl)

Just upgraded my 3-year old laptop (HP Pavilion dv9760ed) to Ubuntu 11.04.  Apparently things went just fine and in a small hour the update completed. Bad thing: my wifi was not working anymore :( . The wifi card on my laptop is based in the Broadcom 4311 Chipset.

First thing i did was checking my PCI devices available. This can be done with te command below. The filter “14e4″ will display only devices manufactured by Broadcom (including wifi cards)

~$ lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4

The result should be something like this:

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g
LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)

lshw is a small tool to provide detailed information on the hardware configuration of your machine.

~$ lshw -C network

Below you see the output of this command. As you can see the Broadcom device is DISABLED

  *-network DISABLED
       description: Wireless interface
       product: BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n
       vendor: Broadcom Corporation

First thing you can try is to activate the proprietary driver under: System > Administration > Hardware/Additional Drivers. Pay attention that this action requiers a working Internet connection (e.g. wired) This did’t do the tric for me. Still no working wifi :(

You can manualy install some packages to get a working wifi connection. I’ve downloaded the following packages:

    B43-fwcutter; Utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmware
    Firmware-b43-installer; Installer package for firmware for de b43 driver

I use 64-bits Ubuntu. If you use a different architecture, the linked webpages provide the right packages voor you with al little search. Attention: the firmware installer also needs an working Internet connection. When installing it will download some source files (somewhere from openwrt.org)

Installing is very simple. As i use Gnome desktop i can dubble click the packages to install the. The ‘Ubuntu Software Center’ window will open en then just hit the install button. Thats al. B43-fwcutter package must be installed first.

After installation everything works fine! However this is not a very user friendly way of upgrade/installation of Ubuntu. The majority of ‘standard’ users will be scared of when this problem occurs.

Some screens of the installation of the above packages

B43-fwcutter installation Firmware-B43-installer installation











To get a temporarily Internet connection i plugged in my laptop in a free port of my router.
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