How to install drivers for bcm43xx chipset based wireless cards in Ubuntu

I had a lot of trouble installing driver for my Broadcom BCM4312 wireless card in Hardy. Probably it was not supported then. With every new release support for a lot of wireless cards have been added but there are many wireless cards which are still not supported. This article aims at getting Broadcom BCM43xx chipset based wireless cards to work on Ubuntu.

First of all check your wireless card, run this command

[shredder12]$ lspci

You should see a line similar to the following.

06:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)

Installation

With Internet(alternate source)

If you have got an alternate internet access on your computer then install b43-fwcutter, this will automatically install and setup the proprietary firmware required to run your card. To install it run this command

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

After installation you might need to restart your computer and your wireless should be working when you login.

Without Internet

2 cases may arise now.

Case 1: Your card was recognized by the Live CD but after installation it doesn't recognize.

Case2: Your card was not even recognized by the Live CD. Here you will have to download the drivers manually and install them.

Case 1

Since your card was recognized by the Live CD i.e. you were prompted for hardware driver installation in Live session it means that the drivers for your wireless card are present in the Live CD. Consider my example.

I use BCM4312 wireless driver and when using Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic in live session I was able to use my wireless card, it means that the drivers were present in the CD. But after installing Karmic System->Administration->Hardware drivers showed that i was using no proprietary drivers so I had to install the drivers from the installation CD. This is how I did it.

1) Insert the CD and look for your driver's packages in the "pool" directory. Since these are restricted drivers its a fair chance that you will find the in pool/restricted/ folder. I found mine in directory "b", copied it and installed it.

2) After that if it automatically doesn't start working( I don't think it will) then go to System->Administration->Hardware drivers and activate the driver.

3) It will most probably start working after step 2 but if we don't add it to the modules list it might not work after restart. When you will restart the next time it won't detect it automatically and the hardware drivers application will show that the driver is installed but currently not in use.

4) Adding the module will solve the problem. The modules in my case was "wl" so I added it using this command.

[shredder12]$ sudo modprobe wl

5) Add it to /etc/modules as well

[shreddder12]$ sudo vi /etc/modules

and add the line wl.

P.S. Please note that wl was the module name in my case. If you are using another driver then you should look for its module name. Just for your info I am using broadcom STA wireless driver which supports BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, andBCM4322-based hardware. So, if you have any of these wireless cards then you may use the same driver and hence the same module.

Case 2

If you don't have any alternate Internet access then you can install b43-fwcutter from Ubuntu 9.04 Installation CD. Insert the CD and open the mounted directory(mostly it is /media/cdrom0) go to pool/main/b/b43-fwcutter/. Install the .deb file present in that folder

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install <filename.deb>

This time the proprietary software won't be downloaded and installed by b43-fwcutter(no Internet). You  will have to install them manually. Download following packages using some alternate source.

• http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
• http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2

Now, run the following commands

[shredder12]$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o

[shredder12]$ tar -xvjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2

[shredder12]$ sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta_mimo.o

If you see no results then try restarting your system. If if fails to work even after a restart the run the following command.

[shredder12]$ sudo modprobe b43

And add the line "b43" in the file /etc/modules

[shredder12]$ sudo gedit /etc/modules

If you are still unable to get your wireless card working then you should opt for Ndiswrapper. It makes use of the wireless card's driver for windows. Refer to this community documentation here for more info.