I have an HP laptop model nx6325 with a Broadcom BCM4311 wireless card. After installing Ubuntu 11.10, I find that my wireless doesn’t work. The reason, Ubuntu detects the wireless but then loads the incorrect driver for this card.
I use the lspci command to display the details about my hardware. It will display all of your PCI connected hardware. I edited the output to show only the relevant information. The important information here for matching your hardware with mine is this indentifier [14e4:4312].
$ sudo lspci -v
30:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Broadcom 802.11a/b/g WLAN
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
Memory at c8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [58] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
Capabilities: [d0] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: ssb
$ sudo lspci -nn
30:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g [14e4:4312] (rev 01)
The Solution
I am going to install the correct driver for this wireless card. Then I will remove the “incorrect” driver (bcmwl) which Ubuntu installed by default.
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer $ sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source $ sudo reboot
Hopefully you found this useful.
If you have this same type of wireless chip in your laptop, these instructions might also work for you.
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