Dell 1390 wireless (BCM4311) Ubuntu 12.04 no wireless icon in unity

Question

I have a Dell Inspiron 1520, which has the Dell Wireless 1390 card (based on the BCM4311 chipset). During installation, Ubuntu 12.04 detected the device and installed the Broadcom STA driver. However, Unity is not showing an icon for the wireless device, so I am unable to connect to any networks. Any ideas what I need to do to get this working?

Edit: lspci -v gives the following info

0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
        Memory at fe8fc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
        Kernel modules: wl, ssb

/proc/net/dev does not contain any entries for the device, however (it just has lo and eth0 listed).

Solution 1

My problem appears to be that in a machine with both a BCM43xx wireless and BCM44xx wired connection, the driver for the wired connection requires the generic 'ssb' module, which grabs the resources needed by both, expecting the final drivers to cooperate with it (?). Unfortunately, broadcom's 'wl' driver (which is the driver I had installed) does not cooperate in the way it expects; only the open-source 'b43' driver is capable of doing this.

This bug seems to be related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/197558

A workaround of the same general kind as the one proposed in comment #4 of that bug would presumably have worked for me, but simpler was to switch to using the 'b43' driver rather than 'wl'. To that end, I blacklisted 'wl'. Once that was done, I added 'b43' to /etc/modules, and the 'b43' driver then loaded automatically at startup, and everything worked smoothly.

Solution 2

Don't know if you're still looking for an answer but the answer here...

How to make my Dell 1390 wlan minicard work

...fixed it for me in a new 12.04 LTS installation on an Inspiron 1520 with the 1390 WLAN card.

Here are the important commands...

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

...which worked perfectly for me.

Hope this helps.

Comments

[Jules]

I'm talking about the icon that's second from the right in this image: 3.bp.blogspot.com/-0Hhy--CG_rk/T5r7lIxbIzI/AAAAAAAAAvo/…

[Robert Smith]

Are you sure that you activated your Broadcom STA driver?. It needs to have a green icon next to your driver name.

[Jules]

The additional drivers application shows a green icon and says it is "activated and currently in use". I have no options for wireless networks in the networks menu, only for my wired network.

[Mouli]

@Jules In Network Indicator menu click on edit connections and see if it's listed there? sometimes connections don't appear in menu, It's probably a bug.

[Jules]

No, the wireless section of the connection editing dialog is empty.

[jokerdino]

possible duplicate of How to make my Dell 1390 wlan minicard work

[Jules]

I'd say the question is related, but not a duplicate. In my case, it turned out that the presence of a BCM44xx family wired network device was the actual cause of the problem, whereas the cause in the question you link was an entirely different card. The nature of the conflict between the drivers is probably the same, however, as is the solution.

[chesedo]

Hi, welcome to AskUbuntu and thanks for your contribution. Note that the ordering of the answers can change - so would you rather that refer to 'answer #2` use ' the answer of @answerer'.