Broadcom Wireless Issues in Lubuntu 14.04

Question

I recently installed Lubuntu 14.04 on my parents' old laptop, and I've been having a super difficult time getting the Broadcom card up and running. I've been following this thread: Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers

...but I'm still stuck.

lspci -vnn | grep Network showed:

06:05.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4320] (rev 02)

iwconfig showed:

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

I've installed b43-firmware-installer and b43-fwcutter and also the linux-firmware-nonfree package. At boot, I keep getting a b43-phy0 error, so I tried sudo rmmod b43, and I got:

rmmod: ERROR: Module b43 is not currently loaded

I also tried:

    dmesg | grep b43
    [   17.318405] b43legacy-phy0: Broadcom 4306 WLAN found (core revision 4)
    [   17.384870] b43legacy-phy0: Loading firmware b43legacy/ucode4.fw
    [   18.046777] b43legacy ssb0:0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
    [   18.046785] b43legacy ssb0:0: Falling back to user helper
    [   18.047858] b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43legacy/ucode4.fw" not
    found or load failed.
    [   18.047965] b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: You must go to
    http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the
    correct firmware (version 3).

I went to url it told me to, but it didn't tell me to do anything I haven't already tried.

Any help and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Solution

Your 4306 hardware, according to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 takes the b43legacy driver, NOT the b43 driver. Try the firmware-b43legacy-installer package to see if that gets you the correct firmware (ucode4.fw) and puts it into /lib/firmware/b43legacy. It looks like you are pulling in the correct driver, it just doesn't have the correct firmware.

Comments

[ratxinxaxcage67]

@ubfan1 Thanks a lot! That fixed it. We can consider this thread closed, I guess.