Wireless Card

Dear Sir / Madam
I Have got an old Dell Inspirin 300 laptop running Ubuntu 14.04 32
Bit but the wireless card does not work . I have done some research and found that it is pretty awkward to fix . The card in question is a Broardcom BCM 4318 [14e4:4318] rev 02 . I have tried various Terminal commands but to no avail .I have fairly basic knowledge , and would really appreciate some help . I am at present using a USB wireless adaptor . Regards Mark

Hi Mark,

You are in the driver development list. You will find much more support in the ubuntu user forums or in the askubuntu web page. I would recommend you to try #ubuntu irc channel to ask for help.

Clicking on this link will let you join such support channel:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?nick=mark_sibley&channels=ubuntu

Cheers

Javier Domingo Cansino

I use a BCM4318 without difficulty. If you look at the output of the dmesg command, you will likely see that the firmware is missing. For legal reasons, no distro is allowed to redistribute such firmware in the manner used by other manufacturers. To overcome this issue, the b43 developers have created a program to "cut" such firmware from a driver for some other system. I am not an Ubuntu user, thus I am not familiar with how this process is implement. The b43 wiki at
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Ubuntu.2FDebian says you should use the command:

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

It further states "In recent versions of Ubuntu and Debian, installing the firmware-b43-installer package will handle everything for you. You will be asked to automatically fetch and install the firmware into the right location. Again, you will need an internet connection." It sounds as if that is all you will need.

If you have already installed the firmware, and you have a different problem, then we will need a more complete description.

Larry