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After installing ubuntu 16.04 I am getting a very weak wifi signal.

Currently, I am sitting 3-4 feet away from my router and I have only 2 bars of wifi signal on my HP Envy M6 notebook. I have checked my TP-link router with my tablet and phone - they both have full bars.

I also feel that this OS is draining my battery faster than Windows 8 (I'm using a dual boot).

Tim
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Noob Coder
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    Did you try installing any avaiable additional drivers? They may solve your wifi problem and give you better general performance. Open the Dash (first icon in the launcher) and type "additional drivers". Open it when it's been found. Wait for the hardware check and install all available drivers. Don't forget to apply (it may take a while). – Eduardo Cola May 01 '16 at 23:59
  • @EduardoCola *All* available drivers? I think you mean wifi applicable ones. – Tim May 02 '16 at 00:04
  • Yes, I mean all available drivers. There's also this battery drainage problem. – Eduardo Cola May 02 '16 at 00:05

2 Answers2

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I had the same thing on my Lenovo G570. After upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 (from Ubuntu 12.04) I noticed that Wi-Fi signal became very flaky.

I fixed the issue by enabling proprietary driver for my wireless adapter (see the screenshot below)

Additional drivers

wheleph
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The Broadcom BCM43142. Some other Broadcom drivers sure are available in the Debian repos, but this one isn’t. So I did the only sensible thing to do: searched the Web. And here’s the solution.

Note: I assume that you know the basics of apt-get and cd commands.

What’s your chipset?

Open the terminal and run

$ lspci | grep BCM

and check if the output contains BCM43142. If it does, this post is for you.

Get the driver

Run

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms broadcom-sta-modules

If it freaks out with the first package, just skip that one. Download this deb package.

cd into the directory containing the package.

Install it using

$ sudo dpkg -i wireless-bcm43142-dkms_6.20.55.19-1_amd64.deb

Activate it.

$ sudo modprobe wl

Done. It should work now.

This works perfect for my new envy I5.

I also install wavemon and walk around my house and now i have signal in places where I dont have it.

Nick Weinberg
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Leonardo P Salas
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