Broadcom Wireless on a Dell Inspiron 8600

Until recently, I was unsure if my Broadcom 4306 chipset wireless modem would work at all under Ubuntu. I had unsuccessfully tried to install it with Dapper Drake, and my first attempt with Edgy Eft was unsuccessful as well.

One thing that I am sure of is that the native bcm43xx driver certainly does not work with this particular card. Actually, and worse, it seems to work at first, before it starts to intermittently lose connection every 2 minutes or so. Frustrated, I decided to give Ubuntu one more try, and installed a clean system.

To get my card working in Edgy Eft, I did the following:

1. Grab the wireless card drivers from support.dell.com for my card.
2. "sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.8" . Note: it is crucial to install version 1.8, and not just ndiswrapper-utils, which defaults to version 1.1 for some reason.
3. "sudo ndiswrapper -i /Directory/Where/Driver/Is/Unpacked/bcmwl5.inf"
4. "sudo modprobe ndiswrapper"
5. "sudo ndiswrapper -m"
6. "sudo apt-get install wifi-radar"

Now I can use wifi-radar to browse and connect to wireless networks, and everything in my world is good. In fact, I just sat on my couch watching an avi format movie streamed from my Windows file server over the wireless network. Thanks, Ubuntu.

Oct 30, 2006