Wireless wont show up on Dell Latitude D620, I am New to LUBUNTU and never used Linux

Question

I got a Dell Latitude D620 from work on condition it had to be DBAN DOD wiped prior to removal. It is a DuoCore 1.6GHz 1GB RAM machine which sounded like LUBUNTU would be good fit... All of it worked including wireless on MS XP SP3.

So I installed LUBUNTU today and am working on on wired connection but wireless does not show up... Tried iwconfig in terminal, which I would copy and paste here but copy{CTRL+C} in Xterm just results in ^C, however it shows lo which looks like a loopback and eth0 which is my wired... No Wireless...

In System Information: Operating System reports Kernel "Linux 3.13.0-37generic (i686)" Operating System reports Distribution "Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS" In Kernel Modules I see a wl but its blank however several 802.11 modules show up... In the PCI devices I see "Network Controller Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g (rev01)"... That all said the LED is off and the hardware switch is on. On WinXP the blue light was on when the switch was on... Here in PCI Devices it knows its Dell and seems to have Broadcom driver...

Is there something like Device manager in windows? Or is System Information as close to that as there is?

I see a couple other Questions requarding this specific model and none seem to have a solution... Concerns me starting into UBUNTU... Hopefully there is a solution. Thanks,

Solution 1

http://nfolamp.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/ubuntu-11-10-getting-wireless-bcm4311-working/

above URL gave me the commands I needed in Terminal to make this work for me:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

sudo reboot

The remove seemed to be the key I needed for my 1490 a/b/g card.

CTRL+Shift+C works on Mint so here is what I got on my D520... (Yes I have both a D520 and a D620... not a typo)

owner@Latit-D520 ~ $ uname -a

Linux Latit-D520 3.13.0-24-generic #47-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 2 23:31:42 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

owner@Latit-D520 ~ $ lspci -vnn | grep 14e4

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX [14e4:170c] (rev 02)

0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g [14e4:4312] (rev 01)

owner@Latit-D520 ~ $

I then compared my model at http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

Solution 2

I have a dell latitude d620 and the answer below did resolve my issue. I was hesitant about the "remove" command and tried it without first and it did not work. Repeating it with the remove did the trick!

    sudo apt-get update

    sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

    sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

    sudo reboot

Comments

[MadMike]

Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V work differently on a terminal (because Ctrl + C is used to abort the currently running process). Use Ctrl + Shift + C and Ctrl + Shift + V to copy paste from and to the terminal.

[Gooderham]

Thanks, I wish it was that simple... Tried that... And yes I am on internet with wired connection. Tried the procedures here - help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx -and many others. I may have tried way too much stuff I don't understand yet with being new to Linux, probably way messed up. XP wireless works... Cannot get working on this D620 in LUBUNTU, UBUNTU or GNOME. GNOME still clean and hoping updates additional drivers would show up but nope... I would paste in my results from lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4 but Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Shift+C don't work from my Terminal window...

[cpow]

Nearly three years later and this answer remains valid. It worked today 2017.08.13 on Lubuntu 17.04 for a D620 with the BCM4311 WiFi. As soon as the reboot occurred the laptop's WiFi indicator LED showed the card as being active, this was not even on prior.