Wired and Wireless both are unclaimed on Alienware 18x

Question

I just got my new Alienware 18x and I have installed Ubunt 12.04 (12.04.3) on my system. But unfortunately my wired and wireless both are not working. I am posting here output of all the important commands; I will highly appreciate if someone can help me out. Thanks in advance.

lspci -nnk | grep -iEA3 "(network|wireless|ethernet)"

09:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Atheros Communications Inc. Device [1969:e091] (rev 10) Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:05ab] 0a:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5116 PCI Express Card Reader [10ec:5209] (rev 01) Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:05ab] 0b:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:43b1] (rev 03) Subsystem: AzureWave Device [1a3b:2b23]

ifconfig

      lo Link encap:Local Loopback 
      inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
      inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
      UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
      RX packets:304 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:304 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
      RX bytes:24144 (24.1 KB)  TX bytes:24144 (24.1 KB)

sudo lshw -C network

*-network UNCLAIMED

   description: Ethernet controller
   product: Atheros Communications Inc.
   vendor: Atheros Communications Inc.
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:09:00.0
   version: 10
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix bus_master cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:d3600000-d363ffff ioport:3000(size=128)

*-network UNCLAIMED

   description: Network controller
   product: Broadcom Corporation
   vendor: Broadcom Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:0b:00.0
   version: 03
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:d3400000-d3407fff memory:d3200000-d33fffff

rfkill list all

no output

ifconfig eth0 up

eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

ifconfig wlan0 up wlan0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

Answer 1

Both devices require drivers that are not present in 12.04.3, which uses the 3.8.0-xx kernel. We could download the drivers and all the dependencies and the dependencies of the dependencies, etc., on a USB drive and, with great difficulty, get both installed.

On the other hand, at least your ethernet is covered in Ubuntu 13.10 and, having a working connection available, we could download and install the wireless in a very few moments. I recommend you install 13.10.