As I upgraded Ubuntu Studio 12.10 to Ubuntu Studio 13.04 on my Mac Book 5.1 my wireless stopped working… After surfing the internet for a couple of days I’ve found the following solution to enable the Broadcom STA on my Mac Book 5.1.
Check whether Ubuntu sees your Broadcom STA device by running the lspci command from a terminal:
| lspci | grep Network |
After using the the lspci command you should get something like this:
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
Next up is, installing the drivers. To install the drivers run the following command using the terminal:
| sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer |
The broadcom-sta-common package, blacklists the b43 driver.
To fix this you need to edit the file: /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf
You can do that by using the following command in the terminal:
| sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf |
Delete or comment out with a “#” the line “blacklist b43”, my file looks like this:
| # wl module from Broadcom conflicts with the following modules: # blacklist b43 blacklist b43legacy blacklist b44 blacklist bcma blacklist brcm80211 blacklist brcmsmac blacklist ssb |
Then to force the module to load during boot by using the following command in the terminal:
| sudo nano /etc/modules |
Then add a line with “b43”, my /etc/modules file looks like this:
| # /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time. # # This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded # at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with “#” are ignored. lp rtc b43 |
You don’t need to reboot your computer as you can load the module manually by entering the following command in the terminal:
| sudo modprobe b43 |
Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line.