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Re: [LUG] Mint 9 and wifi (SOLVED)

 

On 28/10/10 15:39, Neil Winchurst wrote:
On 27/10/10 17:43, Rob Beard wrote:
I have a feeling that the Broadcom BCM 4318 is your wifi card and may
need a firmware or proprietary driver. I'm in the process of fixing a
laptop for a friend which also has a Broadcom wifi card (not sure if
it's the same one mind) and when booting in Ubuntu 10.04 it comes up
with a message saying that something is required, I think it may be a
restricted driver.

This forum post covers this particular card on Ubuntu 10.04 (which I
believe Mint 9 is based on):

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1507981

Doing a search on Ubuntu 10.10 I find that there is a package
firmware-b43-installer in the repositories which is an installer package
for the firmware for this wifi card although on the forum post someone
suggests installing b43-fwcutter.

Of course to download these packages you'll need to plug your machine
into a wired network connection (the Realtek 8139 wired ethernet should
be supported out of the box).

Hope this helps.

Rob

Thanks for your help. I have solved it now. I logged on to my laptop using my Ethernet connection. Then I went Menu --> System --> Hardware Drivers. I waited for the computer to find the drivers. There I found the Broadcom 43 driver. I clicked on the Activate button and let it all happen. The computer downloaded and installed all the relevant files and now my wifi is working, better than ever.

Which leaves me with just one question - why wasn't this driver installed automatically at installation? Strange!

Best regards

Neil

They can only search for so many different devices on an install - testing for each device can take a few minutes so they just test for a limited set - your Broadcom is probably sooo yesterday and/or proprietary. If you'd upgraded rather than installed it would have noticed it was already there.
Tom te tom te tom


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