Wifi On Ubuntu: Installing Broadcom Drivers

Atheros and Broadcom are the two most popular manufacturers of Wifi cards. However, support for using Wifi with them is not present out of the box in Ubuntu Linux. I had covered installing Wifi on Ubuntu for Atheros Wifi cards earlier in this post.

Wifi-broadcom

To install Wifi for Broadcom on Ubuntu, follow the steps below.

Source: youtube.com

If you have a working Internet connection of any form, other than the non-functional Wifi, you can select to install the package named b43-fwcutter, which will do the Wifi driver installation along with the installation of the package itself. Your Wifi should work fine after a restart.

If you  do not have a working Internet connection, then download these two files [ wl_apsta and broadcom-wl ].

Now, open a terminal and install the driver with the commands,

sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
tar xfvj broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
sudo b43-fwcutter –unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Finally, restart your computer to verify if the Wifi is installed.