Tag Archives: drivers

Fixing wirelesscard in Ubuntu

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One of my friends was having wireless card problems one he upgraded from Gutsy 7.10 to Hardy 8.04. The problem was that Hardy was recognizing the wireless card but it wasn’t installing the drivers because they were a third party drivers. Well, in order to do that and fix it I had to do this.

NOTE: THIS TUTORIAL WAS MADE USING LINUX UBUNTU 2.6.24 KERNEL. IT HASN’T BEEN TESTED ON OTHER DISTROS NEITHER OTHER KERNELS. DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Steps:

  1. Open the terminal
  2. type this
    sudo apt-get install build-essential
  3. copy and paste OR type this (each is a separate line in the terminal)
    wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
    tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
    cd b43-fwcutter-011
    make
    cd ..
  4. then
    export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
    wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
    tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
    cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
    sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "/lib/firmware" wl_apsta.o
  5. Now reboot Ubuntu and you should be good to go.

Note that you FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR might change with the distro.