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I just bought a HP Pavilion G4-1212TU laptop and put Ubuntu 11.10 on it. WiFi works badly. It can usually connect (though showing a lower strength level than when the laptop is in Windows) but sometimes immediately, sometimes after a while, the connection becomes so bad as to be unusable.

That is, the connection strength shows the same number of bars, but TCP/IP requests seem to fail or packets lost.

HP doesn't seem to have any LINUX/Ubuntu drivers for the WiFi for this laptop.

$ lspci -nnk | grep -i net -A2
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4727] (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:1795]
    Kernel driver in use: brcmsmac

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 05)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:166d]
    Kernel driver in use: r8169
Rahul Virpara
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Ian
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  • Hi, and welcome to AskUbuntu. Can you update the question with the output of lspci -nnk | grep -i net -A2. The output should provide essential info about the networking hardware. – mikewhatever Jan 15 '12 at 07:41
  • Yep, thanks. Not really sure what's the problem with the wireless. It seems to be using the right driver, at least according to this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/12355/broadcom-bcm4313-working-but-terribly-slow – mikewhatever Jan 16 '12 at 08:52
  • I'm planning to try connecting to another WiFi other than the one at my house to see. At my office, I only have a wired connection (and the laptop works fine with a wired connection.) – Ian Jan 17 '12 at 01:44
  • I have tested it with another WiFi and have the same symptoms -- it starts out working, but then after a few minutes, starts dropping the connection. I dread having to switch back to Windows with this machine, but if I cannot get consistent WiFi on it, I guess I'll have to. – Ian Jan 17 '12 at 14:34
  • I thought I'd try the NDISwrapper option, but the Windows XP driver I downloaded from the HP website is an EXE file, and I'm trying to figure out how to get the INF file out of the EXE file.

    Archive manage complains that the EXE file "Archive: /home/ianlinux/Downloads/sp55086.exe [/home/ianlinux/Downloads/sp55086.exe] End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive." "

     – Ian Jan 19 '12 at 02:34
  • I managed to extract the sp55086.exe by running it in Wine. However, there are no .INF files in the resulting directory. I tried to use cabextract on the .cab files but it said "no valid cabinets found". I tried to use unshield on the .cab files but it says "Aborted".

    I have run out of ideas... am I doomed to put this laptop back into Windows????

     – Ian Jan 19 '12 at 05:12
  • Why not try another native linux driver? Broadcom's STA driver that used to power BCM4313 cards can be obtained by installing bcmwl-kernel-source from the software center. Needless to say, the driver currently in use should be disabled first. – mikewhatever Jan 19 '12 at 07:25
  • Ok, I'm willing to try that... will have to search to see how to disable the current driver. – Ian Jan 20 '12 at 04:14
  • Is this the correct thing to do: add "blacklist brcmsmac" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf ? – Ian Jan 20 '12 at 05:48
  • I see there's already a "blacklist bcm43xx" in that blacklist.conf. Should I remove it? I got this information from the help.ubuntu.com page on Ndiswrapper and that page had said to add this. What you're recommending is for me to try to back up to that version of the WiFi driver, right? – Ian Jan 20 '12 at 05:51
  • Wait, software centre says that bcmwl-kernel-source is already installed on my laptop.... – Ian Jan 20 '12 at 05:54
  • Ok, this is very weird, I've been on WiFi for over half an hour and I still am connected... did the problem just magically solve itself in a recent update? Hmmm... we shall see... – Ian Jan 20 '12 at 06:36
  • Hm..., not sure. You should definitely use only one driver, be is brcm or wl. Let us have a look of lsmod to see what modules are loaded. The output of lsmod is a long list, so perhaps, dump it to http://pastebin.com and post the link. – mikewhatever Jan 20 '12 at 14:50
  • Thanks for your help. Here's the result of lsmod: http://pastebin.com/QmDTmksF – Ian Jan 21 '12 at 08:09
  • There are two different wireless modules/drivers in the output, wl and brcmsmac. Does it work now? If so, which module is in use according to the lspci command from above? – mikewhatever Jan 21 '12 at 08:56
  • Ok, here's the strangest thing. It is NOT WORKING on my WiFi at home after working fine for hours at that other WiFi. It was working with a wired connection to the WiFi device at first, but now it's not working that way either! It can see the 192.168.1.1 of the router administration page, but not anything on the web. This is with a WiFi router that a Ubuntu 11.04 laptop, a Windows 7 netbook, and an Android phone all can connect with. And some times when the 11.10 laptop reboots, Unity doesn't come up properly. I suspect my installation of Unity is faulty. Perhaps I should reinstall that laptop – Ian Jan 21 '12 at 14:32
  • I brought the laptop to church and it's working with the church WiFi (at least for the past couple of minutes... we shall see if it keeps working.) It could be some problem with my home WiFi at this point, though I know earlier it wasn't only that because earlier it wouldn't stay connected to the university's WiFi. – Ian Jan 22 '12 at 02:33
  • After about half an hour, it started losing connection to the church WiFi (though my Android phone continued to have a firm connection, indicating that the church WiFi is still going strong.) – Ian Jan 22 '12 at 03:12
  • Have you removed one of the drivers? It's unlikely that anything is wrong with the access point, since it works well with Windows. – mikewhatever Jan 22 '12 at 04:22
  • Ah, thanks @mikewhatever! I hadn't realized that your earlier comment meant that I had two drivers running at the same time! That could be the reason for my problems! I can't deal with it right now as I have a Chinese New Year celebration to attend, but I plan to try it later -- though, I have to figure out how to disable one first. – Ian Jan 23 '12 at 04:39
  • Have a happy selebration. To disable the wl driver, use the Software Center to uninstall the bcmwl-kernel-source package. To disable the brcmsmac, you'll have to blacklist it by adding "blacklist brcmsmac" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. Reboot after both. – mikewhatever Jan 23 '12 at 08:39
  • Ok, I've tried removing the bcmwl-kernel-source package. It's working right now, but I will soon have to leave my parents' house and go home, to my flaky WiFi at home which definitely has problems because it has caused problems for my wife's Windows 7 netbook and my Android phone as well. (I think part of my problem is that I was having a problem with this laptop at the same time as having a problem with my WiFi at home and so the two problems were confusing me.) – Ian Jan 23 '12 at 12:38
  • I wonder, that one day at work where it kept working for hours, I wonder if it's because I had some streaming audio playing the whole time, so whichever working driver was kept running and didn't allow the other driver to chip in? – Ian Jan 23 '12 at 12:43
  • I removed bcmwl-kernel-source and it worked with my father's YES WiFi, but it isn't working now with my Android WiFi. (That is, my Android phone broadcasting its 3G as WiFi -- my wife's Windows 7 netbook and my old laptop running Ubuntu 11.04 are, however, able to connect to that Android WiFi.)

    I guess the next thing to try is to reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source and blacklist brcmsmac to see if that works...

     – Ian Jan 24 '12 at 15:36
  • I am still getting intermittent WiFi. My WiFi at home died (it had been dying, which was part of the reason for my confusion) and I set up my wife's Windows 7 netbook with Connectify. My old 11.04 laptop and my Android phone connects to the Connectify fine, but the new 11.10 laptop gets intermittent connection to it. Here's another lsmod result given the current setup, having removed bcmwl-kernal-source. http://pastebin.com/VQgqMTP6 Does it look right to you, @mikewhatever? Thanks, Ian. – Ian Jan 26 '12 at 02:31
  • Yep, looks good. – mikewhatever Jan 26 '12 at 20:37
  • Things are still not working right. It has trouble seeing WiFi that are slightly weaker, WiFis that are very strong show up as not very strong, and I'm still losing connection after a while. – Ian Feb 04 '12 at 03:53
  • I guess the next thing to try is to disable brcmsmac and reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source. – Ian Feb 04 '12 at 03:54
  • I had not tackled this problem for some time due to personal reasons but I just came back to it. Tried disabling brcmsmac and reinstalled bcmwl-kernel-source, but now I don't have WiFi at all... sigh. I'm going to try wiping the PC and reinstall Ubuntu from scratch to see if that works. – Ian Feb 14 '12 at 08:36
  • I did the reinstall, and it sort-of works: it shows very poor reception of the WiFi, and many other people with HP Pavilions seem to have the same problem, from what I can tell from googling the problem. – Ian Feb 15 '12 at 15:23
  • Based on the "poor reception" problem, I googled and found this solution which seems to work for me: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1889170 – Ian Feb 16 '12 at 08:47

2 Answers2

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User ts3 over at Ubuntu Forums wrote a solution which worked for me, finally, after so long a struggle. So if you're facing the same problem as me, check it out at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1889170

Here's his summary:

  1. The b-43 installer does not support BCM4313 (4727)
  2. The bcmwl-kernel-source driver (found in the Ubuntu Software Center) supports it but first one needs to make sure that
    1. b43 and the option to activate the STA Broadcom drivers through System Settings -> Additional Drivers are uninstalled/disabled
    2. that those drivers (b43, bcma, brcsmac) are blacklisted and
    3. that the wl driver that works is NOT blacklisted

See the link for details.

Yi Jiang
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Ian
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0

In my HP nx 7300 this worked (from terminal):

sudo apt-get purge broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-source bcmwl-kernel-source ; sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer

Maybe you will need reboot. Good luck!

Costales
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