Getting Broadcom STA to work on Ubuntu Studio 13.04 or Xubuntu

As I upgraded Ubuntu Studio 12.10 to Ubuntu Studio 13.04 on my Mac Book 5.1 my wireless stopped working… After surfing the internet for a couple of days I’ve found the following solution to enable the Broadcom STA on my Mac Book 5.1.

Check whether Ubuntu sees your Broadcom STA device by running the lspci command from a terminal:

lspci | grep Network

 

After using the the lspci command you should get something like this:

03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)

 

Next up is, installing the drivers. To install the drivers run the following command using the terminal:

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

 

The broadcom-sta-common package, blacklists the b43 driver.

To fix this you need to edit the file: /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf

 

You can do that by using the following command in the terminal:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf

 

Delete or comment out with a “#” the line “blacklist b43”, my file looks like this:

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with the following modules:
# blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b44
blacklist bcma
blacklist brcm80211
blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist ssb

 

Then to force the module to load during boot by using the following command in the terminal:

sudo nano /etc/modules

 

Then add a line with “b43”, my /etc/modules file looks like this:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with “#” are ignored.
lp
rtc
b43

 

You don’t need to reboot your computer as you can load the module manually by entering the following command in the terminal:

sudo modprobe b43

 

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line.