Getting saucy

Posted by nvcleemp on May 31, 2014 · 1 Comment 

I know: Trusty Tahr has already been released and Raring Ringtail was already unsupported for a few months. But I finally upgraded to Saucy Salamander. The release of Saucy Salamander more or less coincided with my move to the Czech Republic, so at that time I didn’t really have time to upgrade. After that I kept postponing to do the upgrade: I couldn’t imagine to be without my computer for a few hours. However, each time I was connected to our home network via wifi, the internet connection of my girlfriend dropped significantly in speed. We never could find any problem with the configuration, but clearly my computer was the source of the problem, since everything worked fine if my computer was not connected to the wifi. This morning we had to do some cooking and I decided to upgrade my computer in the meantime.

Everything worked fine downloading and installing the upgrade took just over 2 hours. After restarting my computer however, I was unable to connect to the wifi. I grabbed my UTP cable, connected my laptop to the router and started looking for a solution. I found one on ask ubuntu, but I’ll document the details here as well:

First, let’s find out which network card I have. This is not really needed, but it might be useful to verify whether you have the same issue.

nvcleemp@superman:~$ lspci -nn | grep -i network
12:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:4727] (rev 01)

Note: yes, my laptop is called superman, but that’s what you get if you let your girlfriend choose a name.

Next I just followed the steps from the answer on ask ubuntu:

nvcleemp@superman:~$ sudo modprobe -rv wl
[sudo] password for nvcleemp:
rmmod wl
rmmod cfg80211
nvcleemp@superman:~$ sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
bcmwl-kernel-source*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 4,943 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
(Reading database ... 349473 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing bcmwl-kernel-source ...
Removing all DKMS Modules
Done.
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Purging configuration files for bcmwl-kernel-source ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-22-generic
nvcleemp@superman:~$ sudo modprobe -v brcmsmac
insmod /lib/modules/3.11.0-22-generic/kernel/net/wireless/cfg80211.ko
insmod /lib/modules/3.11.0-22-generic/kernel/net/mac80211/mac80211.ko
insmod /lib/modules/3.11.0-22-generic/kernel/drivers/bcma/bcma.ko
insmod /lib/modules/3.11.0-22-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/brcm80211/brcmutil/brcmutil.ko
insmod /lib/modules/3.11.0-22-generic/kernel/lib/cordic.ko
insmod /lib/modules/3.11.0-22-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/brcm80211/brcmsmac/brcmsmac.ko

To conclude: this indeed solved the wifi issues my girlfriend was having, so apparently there is something wrong with the proprietary drivers for the Broadcom card.

Filed under computer, ubuntu