[SOLVED ] yet another Broadcom Wifi issue

[plainhat]

Hi Folks.
I'm wading into Linux again. Other than a very brief attempt at Ubuntu 10 years ago, I've not spent tons of time in Linux since the early days of Red Hat, so think of me as a clueless newbie with only a bit of very stale command line time. Mint looks beautiful and I expect I will have tons of fun with it (I'm looking to run my media server on it). HOWEVER, some things feel very much the same. In this case, It does not seem to like my Wifi card. In fact, though it obviously sees it, it seems to be ignoring it completely. I looked under "networks" and it only complains that neither of my ether cables are plugged in. This I know. I depend on Wireless for everything. So I poked around the forums here and see tons of others with similar issues. I'm trying to resurrect my old 2009 Mac Pro Tower. I ran inxi -Fx and this line came up:

Broadcom Limited BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n/ Wireless LAN
vendor: Apple AirPort Extreme driver: b43-pci-bridge v: N/A

What magic am I missing? And I guess I'll have to connect the cables to get the missing pieces or is the driver hidden somewhere in the deepest bowels of my install?

Thanks for any help!

[sleeper12]

Just a shot in the dark, but you might try installing one of these in Package Manager. Reboot & see if it helps. If not, you can uninstall them:

firmware-b43-installer

bcmwl-kernel-source

[plainhat]

Oh so close! Yet... so far! First, thanks so much! Your recommendation worked like a charm.. at first. After installing those items I rebooted and logged into my wireless. Perfect... until I rebooted again a little while later. Now it sees the wireless card, but isn't displaying the network. I tried to connect by reusing the network that was in history.. no go. Now what?

[sleeper12]

I wonder if maybe you only need one of those? Uninstall bcmwl-kernel-source, reboot & see if that works.

[plainhat]

well Thanks! I think uninstalling that may or may not have helped. It seems that it is something of a crap shoot whether the wireless will look (or display) possible connections and whether it will connect or not. Generally, if it does not connect on boot, rebooting will work. There is probably something on the command line I might do in order to force the wireless to reinitialize so I don't have to slog through a reboot, but hey! I'm responding using my wireless connection and that feels great! I'm not quite ready to mark this one solved, but we're surely much closer to resolving than when I started. So thanks so very much for that!

[sleeper12]

I read that this command makes it automatic at boot. If you want to try it, run in terminal:

Code: Select all

sudo su
echo b43 >> /etc/modules
exit 

[plainhat]

Again, thanks. The Auto start on boot seems to work, just not consistently. I re installed bcmwl-kernel-source since after I removed it I was seeing it dropping connections. For now it seems to be consistently connecting (but I have no idea what might have changed!) So thanks to you, I'm marking this solved.

[sleeper12]

There might be a conflict of some sort, but if it's working, let it be for now. If it acts up again, you can start a new post where someone brighter than me can figure it out.

Edit: I'm still not sure you need both firmware-b43-installer & bcmwl-kernel-source installed. Maybe someone can pop in here to answer that question.