I’m one of those peo­ple as long as I get my works done, I don’t care if I’m even run­ning on Win ME, and occa­sion­ally some peo­ple made fun of me as a “designer” I don’t use a Mac.  Well, actu­ally, I’m now offi­cially a front-end devel­oper and ex-designer, I can now say I can use what­ever to get my stuff done. Front-end devel­op­ers are “effi­cient” that way if you know what I mean :)  I was pok­ing around Xubuntu to revive my 6–7 years old VAIO, it’s still slow as hell after installed Kubuntu and I really want to learn to use a “nerdy” branded OS, so I now offi­cially announced my Vista HP Acer lap­top is now oper­at­ing under Ubuntu 10.10.

With all the hypes that how easy and fast Ubuntu is, I wasn’t really impress to be hon­est espe­cially the first thing didn’t work was the wire­less. Took me hours to fig­ure it out. Turned out that most peo­ple who have newer lap­tops and with a Broad­com brand wire­less card will have sim­i­lar issue due to the dri­ver wasn’t “install” or what­ever you call it prop­erly.  I finally fig­ured it out and these are the steps I took and worked both times after I installed a “test drive”, wiped, then full install:

Fire up the Ter­mi­nal (Ctrl + Alt + T), let’s do a lit­tle diag­no­sis first to see if you’re hav­ing the same issues and wire­less prob­lem I did.

sudo lshw -C Network

I’m a newb in as men­tioned, but I guess the above com­mand split out your net­work cards brands, set­tings and what not. Your wire­less should be the last group says some­thing like:

*-network DISABLED<br /> description: Wireless interface<br /> product: BMC4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY<br /> vendor: Broadcom Corporation<br /> ... then blah blah blah ...

So now you found out what’s your wire­less model is, write that down some­where. Then do a:

dmesg

Look for some­thing like:

[ 13.938268] brcm80211 0000:06:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17<br /> [ 13.938276] brcm80211 0000:06:00.0: setting latency timer to 64<br /> [ 13.963989] brcm80211: fail to load firmware brcm/bcm43xx-0.fw<br /> [ 13.963993] brcm80211: Failed to find firmware usually in /lib/firmware/brcm<br /> [ 13.964046] brcm80211 0000:06:00.0: PCI INT A disabled<br /> [ 13.964060] brcm80211: wl_pci_probe: wl_attach failed!

Well there you go, that’s the prob­lem. The silly firmware/driver could not load. This is where I will send you to a page with all the good­ies that pretty much got me through. But before that, a few notes:

You will need a tool called b43-fwcutter. Jump to a com­puter with inter­net access and USB thumb drive and down­load the lat­est ver­sion (judg­ing by date on the right hand side), oh, since I’m just as newb, don’t ask me which blah_i36.deb or blah_amd64.deb to down­load. Just grab both. Both installs I did it pre­ferred one over and other, then vice versa *shrug*

Don’t unplug the USB thumb drive yet, now go to my ulti­mate wire­less prob­lem solv­ing page. Since we got the b43-fwcutter taken care of, you can go straight to step 2 and there should be a few files that you need to download.

I fol­lowed the instruc­tions up to step 3, step 4 didn’t work for me. So at that point I did just a good old sudo reboot, wait a few sec­onds, then lap­top now found my wire­less networks.

We’re not alone, there were TONS of peo­ple have wire­less prob­lems with Ubuntu – even one of my co-workers did not aware of this until his cousin told him and me, too. So if the above solu­tion didn’t work for you, here’s the rest of the wire­less doc­u­men­ta­tions for Ubuntu:

Ubuntu Wifi­Docs

I can only assume as long as you found out which dri­ver is miss­ing, and using dmesg to find out whether it’s loaded or not, the above should work the same. Good luck!