How do I get an Acer Npilfy 802.11 wireless card working?

Question

My Laptop is Acer 5742G with "Npilfy 802.11 wireless".

I have both windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.10

Earlier when I had Ubuntu 12.04, the wireless was working fine, but after installing 12.10 wireless is not working at all, although it is still working in windows.

I am not able to see "Wireless Networks" in the Network Manager nor in the Network Settings.

This was the output I got for rfkill

0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no  
    Hard blocked: no  
1: acer-bluetooth: Bluetooth  
    Soft blocked: no  
    Hard blocked: no  
2: hci0: Bluetooth  
    Soft blocked: no  
    Hard blocked: no

This is a snapshot of my Additional Drivers settings.

As you can see, the required driver for wireless is installed.

Answer 1

Your problem looks similar to mine, and I think the new kernel and broadcom drivers are the connection. I ran

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
sudo apt-get install --reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo modprobe wl

and it worked for me on a Samsung netbook.

Answer 2

Please check:

lspci -nn

Is it's pci.id 14e4:4727? If so, this may be helpful:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
sudo apt-get install --reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo modprobe wl

Answer 3

Similar thing happened to me, and I believe my answer is more shifted towards the UI but I think it is basically the same thing as DrA proposed:

1. Install linux-headers-generic (via software center or terminal).
2. In sofware origins > Additional drivers tab, check "Do not use this driver" & apply.
3. Then check again to use Broadcomm propietary driver and apply.

In fact this also worked for me in another laptop that had issues with nvidia drivers.