Thursday, April 23, 2009

Ubuntu Jaunty and the Broadcom driver fail

Here I was installing the new Jaunty release with high hopes that it would work on my laptop 'out of the box'.
Installation went extremely smooth. I used the custom installation option to delete my old Ubuntu 8.10 install and formatted it in favour of an all new fresh system.
I've kept Windows XP installed, so I'll still be using a dual-boot configuration.
Once it was installed, I rebooted and tried to get online right away. In past installations, this was the step that caused me much grief and I was hoping that Jaunty had addressed this issue with those users who have Broadcom wireless cards. (mine is the Broadcom b4318)
No such luck getting a wireless signal without further tweaking. Luckily the driver is available on the Ubuntu CD so installation wasn't the problem. I had my wireless working in no time at all as I had been down this road before and new what to do, and more importantly, what not to do.
Things have improved greatly with the wifi issues compared to previous versions of Ubuntu but I wish it would be possible to have wifi cards automatically detected on installation so that new users won't wonder why Ubuntu isn't working for them and then uninstall and go back to whatever OS they were using before.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello there!

I was wondering if you could help me. I too, have managed to install the Broadcom firmware (chip is 4318), it was really easy, since I'm using ubuntu from gutsy gibbon. So, it took me a half an hour to make it work, and I was thrilled. But after I rebooted my pc, the wifi isn't working. When I click on the network-manager applet is says: device not managed.

What should I do? I've tried everything known to me, but that's not much since I'm no expert :)

Thanks in advance,
Attila

Ubucrates said...

Without knowing your Ubuntu version or what system you are running(32bit or 64bit), I'll offer a couple of suggestions that you could try.

Did you install the b43 driver?
sudo apt-get install bc43_fwcutter

After you do that just enter the following command:
sudo modprobe b43
Reboot and test your network connection.

If that didn't work, then check out the linux wireless website. Here's the direct link to the b43 driver page:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
There is a step-by-step given there to help you get your wireless working.
Good Luck!
Let me know how you make out.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the reply! I did manage to make it work with the Broadcom firmware b43,(I'm using the 32 bit desktop version of Jaunty) but I lost the settings after restart, so I tried "the old way" with ndiswrapper - windows wireless drivers, and it worked! Thanks, I just learned a lot about making wireless work, and understanding linux in a new way :)

Greetings,
Attila

Ubucrates said...

Glad to hear that it worked for you.

Vivero said...

Thank you very much from Spain, Mr. Ubucrates. My wireless net was working very poorly in Jaunty with a BCM4318 (Air Force, etc.): low radio signal and one cut after another, all the time (and my router couldn't be guilty, for I have another laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 working ok in the same place). After following your guidance (blindly: I'm rather dummy!) it seems to be working ok. Thanks.