Broadcom bcm34224 not working SOLVED

[erikandreassen]

HP Probook 6540b with BCM34224 wifi card (and a nasty whitelist in the bios)

After an awful lot of trials and reading I thought I'd share the fix. Should work with both ubuntu mint and lmde series distributions.

First off in terminal

sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source

Next in your file manager open it as root so you can alter system files. Go to

/etc/modprobe.d and if a file called "iwlwifi.conf" add a ".bak" to the file and make sure b43 blacklist has been purged as well.

reboot

and that's it. From what I've gleaned it the bcmwl etc... blacklists the drivers necessary for the card, purging it (a full remove) stops it from doing so as the drivers are included in the default linux-firmware.
Next the file "iwlwifi.conf" does something strange by deleting iwlwifi and letting it decide with driver to run, a wee bit difficult after being removed. This is the one that gave me the biggest headache and a lot of reboots.

So SOLVED and hope it helps someone out with similar problems

[JeremyB]

The edit to /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf file name was unneeded as it only exists to help users do sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi without having to unload iwlmvm or iwldvm first and it performs no actions on its own. It might help others more if you post results for

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lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net

It is likely a card that uses brcmsmac or brcmfmac module

[erikandreassen]

it does but the wl driver is auto installed when installing the os which automatically blacklists the one you need and from what I've read after working on this for 4 days (i know I don't give up easily) is there might be a solution out there but of the 100's of articles not one worked or if it did was gone after a reboot.

HP-ProBook-6540b ~ $ lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 net
44:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4353] (rev 01)
DeviceName: WLAN
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n [103c:1510]
Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
--
45:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8072 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller [11ab:436c] (rev 10)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company 88E8072 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller [103c:1724]
Kernel driver in use: sky2
Kernel modules: sky2
ff:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers [8086:2c62] (rev 02)

[JeremyB]

Actually https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2214110 shows the correct info, the first command is

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sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source

And it shows your device to use Special Case #1 which is to

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sudo -i
echo "blacklist b43" >>  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
echo "blacklist ssb" >>  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
exit

There are times when it isn't necessary to run those commands. I use a Broadcom ID'd as 14e4:4727 and I didn't have to blacklist b43 and ssb