Ubuntu Issue: Wireless card driver doesn't "stick"

Each time I restart I have to reinstall the driver.. any ideas?

[donovanh]

Hey all,

I've recently taken the plunge and installed the lovely Ubuntu on my work laptop (dual boot with XP). I'm most impressed with it so far, and with only a little bit of tutorial following I'm now online and using the crazy nice graphics options.

However the issue seems to be with the wireless driver. I'm using a Broadcom 43xx driver, which is listed under the restricted drivers section. I used NDISWrapper to install the windows drivers, and it works nicely. Except.. when I restart, the network manager tool seems to "forget" the wireless option, and the only way I found to get it working again is to remove the driver in Restricted Drivers and add it back.

Is there a way I can get this to stick between restarts? If so, I'll be much obliged for your generous suggestions.

Don

[Little_G]

Hi,

A quick search turned up these two howtos:
[ubuntuforums.org...]
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/... [linuxquestions.org]
The first one looks simpler than the second.

Andrew

[donovanh]

Thanks for the reply :)

I've tried both methods listed, and they do seem to work in as much as the wireless connection is found and connects.

However, the issue is that when I restart, the connection manager loses the Wireless Connection option and I have to reinstall the drivers through the Restricted Drivers Manager to make it see the wireless card again.

Getting it to connect isn't simply the issue, it's that it forgets about the wireless connection for some reason when I restart.

I've tried using WICD instead of the network manager tool, but the same occurs. :(

[encyclo]

I have a similar problem (although possibly unrelated), which unfortunately I have never fully resolved:

[webmasterworld.com...]

As I have a USB device, I just wait for the machine to boot and then plug it in, but I guess you can't do that.

I think I'll look at my problem again now that you bring up the issue. Do you get any error messages in the log?

One issue I've found that may be related to your problem is found in the Ubuntu documentation:

[help.ubuntu.com...]

3.1 Disable Free Drivers
Firstly, Dapper comes with the open source bcm43xx driver, see WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx. If this driver doesn't work for you, then you should disable it, because it will conflict with ndiswrapper. To disable it, add

blacklist bcm43xx

to the modprobe blacklist.

[donovanh]

Hey encyclo.. it does seem to be a similar issue. I've blacklisted the bcmxx driver according to several tutorials, but again the restart issue persists.

It's not ideal but reinstalling the driver each time I restart seems to be the only way to go at the moment. I'll just put up with it for now and see if a newer version fixes the issue :)

Cheers, D

[donovanh]

Quick update: I managed to break everything when messing with a manual graphics drivers upgrade, and ended up reinstalling from scratch.

I did the ndiswrapper method, as described in the second link above, then added the bcm43xx-fwcutter thing and installed the firmware through restricted firmware.

The main thing I did differently was to disable the Roaming mode and specify the SSID details. When I restarted it worked flawlessly.

Cheers for the help :)