Ubuntu – Acer Aspire One 722 broadcom 4313 wifi

acerbroadcomwireless

I had an Acer Aspire One 722 with the Atheros Wifi card and it worked fine on 11.04. So we bought 200 of them for our school. However these all came with the Broadcom BCM4313 wireless card and there are issues. It is using the brcmsmac driver and they connect initially. However after a time (sometimes just a few webpages) some of them lose connection. However, they still have an IP and network-manager says they are connected, but no pages load and you can't ping anything on the LAN or internet. A disconnect/reconnect can fix it, but sometimes a restart is required. It happens frequently so is a major issue. Lots of broadcom drivers are blacklisted: bcm43xx, b43, brcm80211. Any ideas or experiences with the broadcom4313 card? Please save these computers from a Windows fate!

Best Answer

Colin,

I have exactly the same problem as you with an Aspire One 722 (BCM4313 14e4:4727). Connects ok with wifi then system crashes after a few web pages.

To cut out all the red herrings involving the various drivers, the following seems to work. I've tried it with a fresh install of Lubuntu 12.04 (absolutely no changes needed other than below) and it works well. Relief. When Ubuntu starts up for the first time after installation it asks if you want to activate the proprietary driver; I left that alone and didn't activate it. It turns out that it does "just work" after all (other than below). If you have attempted various other fixes, a reinstall would be easiest way to get it back to correct state, or make the BIOS change and then try a live CD to confirm before reinstalling.

Ubuntu Install on Acer Aspire One 722

In case that link stops working, here's a copy of the text :

Under Ubuntu Natty, the Aspire One 722 wifi adapter is fully supported, but presents a very annoying bug, specific to the AO722 hardware.

In fact, every time you try to connect to a wireless network, your netbook may freeze, the only option being a hard reset !

It seems that this bug comes from a conflict between the ethernet and the wireless adapter.

But the good news is that there is a very simple tip to avoid this bug : you need to setup a specific boot order, where the network boot is used first. With this setup, the ethernet adapter will be configured in a way that there won't be any conflict with the wifi adpater at the time of wireless network connexion.

To do so, reboot your netbook and enter the BIOS by typing F2 at boot time.

First, set the Network Boot as the first one in the boot priority order :

Next, be sure that Network Boot is enabled :

Save and exit.

After reboot, the freeze problem should be part of the past …

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