Ubuntu – How to get proprietary Broadcom drivers to work after installation

13.04broadcomdriverswireless

This is my first installation of Ubuntu, but I've been running it live on a DVD and flash drive for months. Today I installed Ubuntu 13.04 onto a 3-year old Lenovo G550 laptop, and it has a proprietary Broadcom wireless driver.

When I booted Ubuntu as a live system from the DVD, telling Ubuntu to use the proprietary driver in the settings menu was straightforward, and I was able to connect to my home wifi. However, after installation, I attempted to do the same process, but after I hit "apply changes" after selecting "use broadcom 802.11 Linux STA wireless driver source from bcmwl-kernel-source (propretary)", I was met by a pop-up telling me to authenticate. I entered my password, and hit enter. The window dims, a bar indicates that the change is working, but then it changes again to "do not use driver."

For some reason, the driver just won't install. It worked when I was running Ubuntu live, but after installation it won't work. What do I do? My laptop is compromised if I can't use the wireless (because Windows 7 crashed on the computer).
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

It seems that there is some problem occurred when you installed Wireless Broadcom 802.11 driver. You can give a try to followings:

  1. Open a terminal and execute following commands:

    $ sudo (jockey-gtk &)
$ sudo update-grub
$ sudo update-initramfs -u

    jockey-gtk will automatically searches all available drivers and try to fix it. Then restart your system.

  2. Try to reconfigure installed Broadcom Wireless Driver

    $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure bcmwl-kernel-source

    if it still doesn't work then re-install it by completely removing it:

    $ sudo apt-get autoremove bcmwl-kernel-source
$ sudo apt-get --purge remove bcmwl-kernel-source
$ sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source

  3. Try to update your system, sometimes updating fixes a lot of issues. Update your system after removing any broken packages, residual unused packages, execute these commands:

    $ sudo apt-get autoremove
$ sudo apt-get autoclean
$ sudo apt-get install
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

I hope any of these steps work for you. Reply if something goes wrong..

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