I am new to Ubuntu and I have just installed Ubuntu 11.10. The problem is that the BCM4313 wireless card keeps disconnecting all the time.
From the Additional drivers window, I can see that the "Broadcom STA wireless driver" is installed.
I would appreciate any help at the moment as I am thinking to return back to Windows.
The output of "lsmod | grep cfg80211" is cfg80211 199630 2 brcmsmac,mac80211
There are two drivers for this chip AFAIK.
Try lsmod | grep cfg80211 and see if it outputs wl or brcmsmac.
This is open-source driver which comes in the kernel so it should work out of the box. But in some case you may need to blacklist bcma module first. If you are not using it by default in order to give it a try do
sudo modprobe -r wl && sudo modprobe brcmsmac
OR if the above command doesnot give you anything
sudo modprobe -r bcma ssb wl && sudo modprobe brcmsmac
This is the additional driver you are talking about provided by the package broadcom-sta-common. You can test it the same way as above just do.
sudo modprobe -r brcmsmac bcma b43 && sudo modprobe wl
The opensourcedriver doesnot have a LED support so your wireless LED won't turn on. Apart from that the open source driver doesnot have powersave option as well which is enabled during battery laptop usage. But my internet connection lagged during powersave option of wl driver.
If you find your internet connection lagging during battery try How can I prevent iwconfig power management from being turned on?
See which works for you.
In order to make things permanent just add
blacklist MODULE_NAME in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and inorder to load the module add it in /etc/modules. So if you would like to use say wl you would add
blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist bcma
blacklist ssb
blacklist b43
in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add wl in /etc/modules
This is a pretty good documentation on broadcom drivers.
lsmod | grep cfg80211? – sagarchalise Mar 06 '12 at 17:14