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My dell xps 13 has a broadcom 4352 wireless adapter. It used to work (though not so well) with an automatically installed proprietary driver Broadcom 802.11 Linus STA wireless driver from bcmwl-kernel-source.

Yet not so long ago, it suddently stopped working, after an Ubuntu update I guess... the wireless tab in the settings either won't appear, or it says that there is no adapter.

I tried the fixes proposed in other posts, mainly starting from this one: Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers

so I tried to reinstall the driver I used with the software updater, to install the driver manually from command line, I played with the modprobe command and the associated blacklist.conf file to block other drivers that may interfere (bcm43xx, b43, b43legacy, ssb, brcm80211, brcmfmac, brcmsmac, bcma). I tried various possibilities but without success.

I tried also to use Ndiswrapper (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper) to install the windows driver but couldn't find the .INF file for the driver neither unpack the .exe file that comes from dell support (tried cabextract and unshield as suggested in the instructions...)

Using the command rfkill list, I used to get two wirless devices displayed, one called phy0 and the other bwl I think, now there is nothing displayed.

Do you have advices to start from a clean situation and try again from 0? For now I have the feeling it is all messed up with various drivers installed and blacklisted items...

Thank you for the help! It is really great to be able to ask questions here!

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  • Which is kernel version? Sep 1, 2020 at 18:29
  • thanks for asking: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is a name of kernel? It is my operating system anyway
    – cainbantam
    Sep 12, 2020 at 12:43
  • to make it more precise: initially, the wireless settings appeared, and displayed that the adapter is not working, then I installed an additional driver which caused the wifi settings not to appear any more. I understood that because as described in my own answer, when uninstalling all the drivers I could find and reinstalling the default one, the wifi setting came back...
    – cainbantam
    Sep 17, 2020 at 3:29

1 Answer 1

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So I tried recently to remove all packages related to my wirless network adapter: I checked all the names of drivers related to the network adapter which I could find: bcm43xx, b43, b43legacy, ssb, brcm80211, brcmfmac, brcmsmac, bcma

with the command "dpkg --list | grep NAMEOFDRIVER" I found 2 packages with names corresponding to driver names: bcmwl-kernel-source, broadcom-sta-dkms

I checked them with the command "aprpopos" to try making sure it wasn't something else and then removed both with "apt-get purge NAMEOFPACKAGE".

It did help a little for before that I had an issue with the tool "additional driver" tool of the "Software & Updates" program. And so I could use it again to automatically install the driver ("Broadcom 802.11 Linuy STA wireless driver source from bcmwl-kernel-source")

But then I was still stuck with the message "No wifi adapter found" in the wifi settings.

Also, using the "rfkill list" command, I could again get the following output:

0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no

1: brcmwl-0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes

So I'm back to the initial issue... still no wifi adapter working. I repeat that the adapter works for it works with my windows partition. Any help welcome, I've been stucked here for a month or so and tried everything I could think of or read of...

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  • Maybe I shouldn't have answered my own post cause now it is considered as answered. Maybe I will try with a more concise, fresh post...
    – cainbantam
    Sep 17, 2020 at 3:30

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