How to make money wifi on broadcom 43xx chip under Linux

When I put a broadcom 4311 Ubuntu 8.10 chip on my Dell Latitude D520 about a year ago, I ran into the fact that wi-fi refused to work at all. I googled, spent a couple of days studying posts in various forums, did some shamanic actions and safely forgot both the problem and the actions that I did.

Everything would be fine, but the devil pulled me to put Karmic Koala from scratch ... I immediately remembered the problem. But the decision was completely forgotten.

Quick solution

So, after booting, I discovered that wi-fi is not working for me. Having looked in / var / log / syslog, I saw there the following suspicious line:

ERROR: Firmware file "b43 / ucode5.fw" not found or load failed

')
Walking through Google, I found a blog in which there was a solution to a problem like "unpack the archive there and it will work . " I downloaded the archive from which there was the missing firmware, unpacked it in / lib / firmware / and everything really worked.

I must say that at 8.10 the problem was not so easily solved, because there were other drivers. At 8.10 there were bcm43xx, now b43 is loaded.
Along the way, with the search for a solution, I came across a site with these very b43 drivers , where there is a lot of information on how to support various broadcom 43xx chipsets with these drivers.

I also met in several places the opinion that b43 work worse and more unstable than native drivers.

I also thought that I had seen much more on the list of networks before, so I decided to take a slightly more complicated path, which was still at 8.10, namely:

Running the manufacturer's drivers - the solution is more complicated

I downloaded the native drivers from the Dell support site. They were in the form of a self-extracting archive, but without any problems they were unpacked by file-roller

Next, do the following:

• Install ndiswrapper , a utility that allows Windows drivers for wireless cards to work in Linux.
• Remove the b43 module from startup by placing it in the blacklist:
  sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
  add there line: blacklist b43
• We load screw drivers:
  sudo ndiswrapper -i /path_to_drivers/bcmwl5.inf
• In order for ndiswrapper to start when the system boots, we add it to / etc / modules ( sudo vim / etc / modules and add the ndiswrapper line to it)
• Further, after the restart, everything should work, but it was not there.
  Rebooted, and wi-fi still does not work.
  
  The reason for this is the ssb module, which is loaded before ndiswrapper and does not allow it to take control of the wi-fi card.
  
  If this module is loaded (we look with the help of lsmod | grep ssd ), then again we open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add ssd and b44 there - which causes loading of ssd.
• Next, run sudo update-initramfs -u and update the list of loadable modules so that ssb does not boot
• Now you can reboot or manually unload unnecessary modules and load the desired ndiswrapper and wi-fi will work.

Subjective sensations on Windows drivers, everything works really better and more stable.