Wireless network not showing up

Question

My other laptop is in for repairs so im using my old one now, running ubuntu 12.O4, i have the broadcom installed but it is not showing any wireless networks not a wireless connection, using inspiron 152O, was wondering if anyone can help?

Answer 1

I have a Broadcom BCM4313 wireless card and I had the very same problem: my WPA router network was not showing up.

You have just to change the wireless channel on your router and that's it! Try one under 12. For instance, I found that channel 3 and 4 worked great for me.

Hope that works.

Answer 2

By default, Ubuntu provides a generic Broadcom driver, packaged as broadcom-sta-common. This driver lacks a very important part: firmware for the device. Most Broadcom wireless chips require firmware to be loaded onto them every time they start. This firmware is freely available in the Ubuntu repositories. For legal reasons, Ubuntu cannot install it by default. Users must do it themselves. To do that, find "firmware-b43-installer" in Ubuntu Software Center.

Note that firmware-b43-installer will conflict with broadcom-sta-common. Make sure you do not have both installed.

Also, on some machines, firmware-b43legacy-installer or firmware-b43-lpphy-installer might have to be used. To be sure, check this list of supported devices. While you're at it, knowing the exact id of your chip might help: type lspci -nn | grep Network into the terminal. You should get a line like this:

0001:01:01.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4318] (rev 02)

The exact id of your chip is at the end. In this case, 14e4:4318 is what you should remember. Google it.