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.
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.
mike
November 13th, 2009 at 6:54 am #
Downloaded files as per instructions via other pc, copied them to desktop, but commands as per instructions above failed with message “cannot open input file” . Tried to copy files into /lib/firmware but permission denied. I’m a frustrated new user and have spent 4 hrs now trying to get wifi to work. Any help appreciated.
thanks
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mike
November 13th, 2009 at 7:31 am #
Aha, Looked at earlier post re Atheros cards and put my downloads into my Home folder. Commands 1 and 2 worked fine. Command 3 failed until i realised the instructions were truncated in my pc view, losing the at the end. Got the complete instruction with View/page-source! Used corrected instruction and all went well. WIFI now working.
) My thanks to Chinmoy Kanjilal !!!
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