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I just moved a primary hard drive from one laptop to a higher spec one. The higher spec machine worked perfectly for me under Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 (I'm handing it down). The newly inserted primary hard drive has 16.04 on it, and was running in a largely similar machine (laptop, i7 processor) but the "new" home has more of everything (memory, faster CPU, screen resolution).

Well, on first boot, the BIOS asserts "bad partition table" but the system boots perfectly with no complaints from Ubuntu. I can log in, and all looks essentially unchanged. However, there is no mention of WiFi on the network manager menu.

Obviously, the wifi hardware in these two machines is different, and I need to "reset/reinstall" the necessary drivers. But I don't know how to do that (the other drivers, notably the video, simply sorted themselves out by all evidence :)

Can someone tell me how to effectively reinstall the wifi subsystem, without disturbing the rest of the system?

03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]
    Subsystem: Dell BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [1028:0014]
    Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
    Kernel modules: bcma
Pilot6
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Toby Eggitt
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  • Please edit your question to show the result of the terminal command: lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3 – chili555 Feb 21 '19 at 20:45
  • OK, I think I'm beginning to follow the other answer, but I have a question. The notes say "The system has to start from scratch in order for this to work and to avoid any conflicts". Well, it seems highly likely that I do have conflicts (from the previous hardware), so how can I get rid of these (particularly since I'm not even sure what the previous hardware used?) – Toby Eggitt Feb 21 '19 at 21:43
  • Aaand, success. Fortunately, was able to get wifi working on that machine using a USB dongle, but thensudo apt update ; sudo apt install bcmwl-kernel-source did the trick. The purge and the update of pciids were redundant though I did them anyway. – Toby Eggitt Feb 21 '19 at 22:09
  • Indeed, I think the reason it apparently didn't matter that I couldn't "clean out the previous state" was that the previous state had no Broadcomm drivers at all. The comment I made about the purge command being redundant was because when I did that, it told me the package wasn't found on the system anyway. – Toby Eggitt Feb 21 '19 at 22:11
  • And finally, I'm not sure if I should mark the "that solved my problem button or not". It's entirely unclear in that answer that it's relevant, but it is. I feel like my question adds context to the question, while it's totally valid that this question shares it's answer with the linked post. I invite you moderator folks to do what's right :) – Toby Eggitt Feb 21 '19 at 22:12

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