I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my Dell Inspiron 1521 and the LAN/Ethernet card was working perfectly but Ubuntu was displaying a message about not installing the Wireless drivers because it was restricted or something along that line.
I then went to the Synaptic Package Manager, searched for all Broadcom packages and installed them. So far so good.
I restarted my computer and to my surprise, my wireless works but my lan isn't! What the heck could be wrong?
I then uninstalled/removed all the packages I installed earlier hoping my ethernet would start working again but hey, nothing changed. My wireless card works and the ethernet still doesn't.
Is there any way of getting this fixed?
I checked and found my network devices were:
- Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
- Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN
(rev 01)
Best Answer
After a lot of sweat I figured it out.
Apparently, installing the new wlan drivers blacklisted the ethernet drivers.
I opened the file
/etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf
¹ and commented out the line blacklisting the ethernet adapter (which was b44 by the way).The file now looks like this:
End result, the ethernet works like expected. As a matter of fact, I'm replying over ethernet.
¹ My attention has been drawn to the fact that the filename may not be the same on all systems.
One user reportedly found the blacklist data in
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43.conf
. I am however unable to determine which configuration (version of Ubuntu, OS language, etc) this manifests on.