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I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my Dell Inspiron 1521 and the LAN/Ethernet card was working perfectly but Ubuntu was displaying a message about not installing the Wireless drivers because it was restricted or something along that line.

I then went to the Synaptic Package Manager, searched for all Broadcom packages and installed them. So far so good.

I restarted my computer and to my surprise, my wireless works but my lan isn't! What the heck could be wrong?

I then uninstalled/removed all the packages I installed earlier hoping my ethernet would start working again but hey, nothing changed. My wireless card works and the ethernet still doesn't.

Is there any way of getting this fixed?

I checked and found my network devices were:

  • Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
  • Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
Braiam
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Alex Essilfie
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  • The message you recieve is normaly about restricted drivers being avaliable this from the a specific program Called hardware drivers in the administration menu I would check this to see if any of them are enabled or not and what drivers you are offered I have heard of multiple drivers being suggested for Broadcom networking. It would help if you added the status of these to your question. – Allan Nov 26 '10 at 11:49
  • @Allan. I don't get your suggestion. How do I get the status of these hardware you're talking about? – Alex Essilfie Nov 26 '10 at 12:06
  • Generally when you do a fresh install of ubuntu when you first login ubuntu will do a hardware check and a notification Icon will pop-up advising you about the avaliabilty of any "restricted" eg closed source drivers if you click on this Icon it will open the Hardware Drivers program which is only ever used for enabling or disabling these optional drivers. You can always check the status of any of these drivers by opening this section. For example In my own case it allows me to enable or disable the Proprietory ATI Graphics Drivers. – Allan Nov 26 '10 at 13:08
  • Okay. I checked and it says Broadcom STA wireless driver is activated and currently in use. I however can't seem to find my ethernet device anywhere... What could possibly be wrong? – Alex Essilfie Nov 26 '10 at 13:23
  • Just checked the forum which I see you have posted in already. There is a post about your specific network hardware here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=430551 which suggests using the b44 module by using these commands sudo modprobe b44.ko then ifconfig -a – Allan Nov 26 '10 at 13:30
  • If this is succesful please reply for other users with the same problem I will update this question and add areply to your post in the forum. – Allan Nov 26 '10 at 14:06
  • Full instructions are here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx – Chloe Feb 09 '16 at 06:09

2 Answers2

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After a lot of sweat I figured it out.

Apparently, installing the new wlan drivers blacklisted the ethernet drivers.

I opened the file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf¹ and commented out the line blacklisting the ethernet adapter (which was b44 by the way).

The file now looks like this:

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb  
# We must blacklist the following modules:  
#blacklist b44      <--Commented out this line
blacklist b43legacy  
blacklist b43  
blacklist ssb  
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS

End result, the ethernet works like expected. As a matter of fact, I'm replying over ethernet.



¹ My attention has been drawn to the fact that the filename may not be the same on all systems.
One user reportedly found the blacklist data in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43.conf. I am however unable to determine which configuration (version of Ubuntu, OS language, etc) this manifests on.

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  • Good to hear you have found the solution sorry I couldn't have been more help at the time. – Allan Nov 26 '10 at 19:14
  • It says the file is autogenerated by bcmwl and will be overwritten. Do you have a more permanent solution? – Chloe Feb 09 '16 at 03:14
  • @Chloe Where does it say that? At the minimum, you can redo the mods after the system configuration changes. I'm certain you won't have to do it after each reboot. – Alex Essilfie Feb 09 '16 at 07:18
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I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Dell Inspiron 6400 and my LAN / Ethernet card does not work.

root@MM061:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 4 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 
01)
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7-M Family) SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller (rev 01)
**03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)**
03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller
03:01.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
03:01.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 0a)
03:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 05)
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

In Broadcom Web:(http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/4401.php download this driver. The following are general guidelines for installing the driver.

  1. Create a directory and extract the files:

    tar xvzf b44-<version>.tar.gz

  2. Build the driver b44.o (or b44.ko) as a loadable module for the running kernel:

    cd src
make

  3. Test the driver by loading it: 

    insmod b44.o

    or

    insmod b44.ko (on 2.6.x kernels)

    or

    insmod b44

  4. Install the driver:

    make install

See RPM instructions above for the location of the installed driver.

  1. To configure network protocol and address, refer to various Linux documentations.

    root@123-MM061:/home/123# cd b44-1.00g/
root@123-MM061:/home/123/b44-1.00g# ls
b44.4  b44.c  b44.h  LICENSE  Makefile

I do not know what cd src means

root@vince-MM061:/home/123/b44-1.00g# make
gcc -DMODULE -D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -I/lib/modules/3.2.0-23-generic-pae/build/include  -DOLD_NETIF -DOLD_DMA -DNO_DMA_MAPPING_ERROR -O2   -c -o b44.o b44.c
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