Magnus K Karlsson: Changing Broadcom Driver In Ubuntu

December 10, 2013

Changing Broadcom Driver In Ubuntu

I have a Broadcom Wireless Network Adapter and I had all sort of problem with the standard driver, Broadcom STA Wireless driver or wl that the module is called.

To identify which Broadcom chipset you have. Run:

$ lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4
45:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:4727] (rev 01)

To identify which modules (driver) you are using (running):

$ egrep 'ssb|wl|brcmfmac|brcmsmac|bcma' /proc/modules

I had the STA or wl module running. To remove all possible Broadcom modules.

$ sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb wl brcmfmac brcmsmac bcma

And to really remove the default STA or wl module, also remove the debian package. After the purge, that remove configuration files as well, I double run apt-get with remove autoremove, which will remove unused package and finally I run clean, to clean the apt-get cache. All for precaution.

$ sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source && sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get clean

Now you must test which driver/module that suites you best. I started with the b43 driver/module.

$ sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  b43-fwcutter
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 22.8 kB of archives.
After this operation, 120 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y

To load the new module/driver.