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I'm brand new to Ubuntu and therefore am the noobest of noobs. I hope someone can help.

I've just installed 13.10 on my Dell Inspiron 6400. When installing the software, my wired internet connection worked. However, when installation completes, neither my wired or wireless connections work.

My understanding so far is that it seems I don't have my Broadcom BCM4401 (ethernet controller) or Broadcom BCM4311 (network controller) drivers installed. I've managed to download these drivers from my Windows PC, but it appears I need Synaptic Package Manager to install them on my Ubuntu laptop, which itself requires internet access to install.

Does anyone know how I can get my internet access up and running?

Thanks

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  • Can you add the output of lshw -c network to your question?
    – Mitch
    Nov 8, 2013 at 19:34

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The 'Additional Drivers' tool often offers to install the wrong driver for Broadcom 4311. Please open a terminal Ctrl+Alt+t and do:

sudo modprobe b44

Your ethernet should now be working. Hook it up and fix the wireless:

sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

Detach the ethernet, reboot and everything should be working as expected.

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  • It should happen that you have to remove b44 from the black list. comment all the lines in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43.conf file and reboot
    – Zsolt
    Mar 22, 2014 at 18:29
  • @Zsolt Purging bcmwl-kernel-source removes the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43.conf file altogether.
    – chili555
    Mar 22, 2014 at 19:58
  • That's strange because I still had it on my machine :-(
    – Zsolt
    Mar 23, 2014 at 20:42
  • Did you remove or purge?
    – chili555
    Mar 23, 2014 at 23:00
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My solution was to buy a USB Ethernet dongle for $10. I spent a lot of spare time over 2 weeks trying to get this to work without success, then decided it was easier to spend the $10.

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