Broadcom wi-fi to work on Ubuntu
July 12th, 2007
A Broadcom wireless card does not work on Ubuntu out of the box. Ubuntu includes the right driver for these cards (bcm43xx) and the card is recognized by the kernel. You can see it in the available wireless interfaces, but you cannot connect to any wireless network. This is because the driver itself is not enough for these cards to work. Additional firmware is required by the driver. To solve this problem on Feisty Fawn could not be simpler, you just have to type:
This will install the bcm43xx-fwcutter utility (which is used to extract firmware out of Windows drivers binaries), but it will also automatically download windows binaries from the Internet, run the fwcutter program and install the extracted firmware, so you won't have to do nothing at all (perhaps the only thing you may need to do is to reload the bcm43xx driver).
This easiness of making things work should be much appreciated, if you consider that on earlier Ubuntu versions you had to download and compile the bcm43xx-fwcutter program from source, find and download driver binaries, run the fwcutter, and finally install the output firmware files.
sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutterThis will install the bcm43xx-fwcutter utility (which is used to extract firmware out of Windows drivers binaries), but it will also automatically download windows binaries from the Internet, run the fwcutter program and install the extracted firmware, so you won't have to do nothing at all (perhaps the only thing you may need to do is to reload the bcm43xx driver).
This easiness of making things work should be much appreciated, if you consider that on earlier Ubuntu versions you had to download and compile the bcm43xx-fwcutter program from source, find and download driver binaries, run the fwcutter, and finally install the output firmware files.