Why Can't I Connect Wirelessly with My Gateway Laptop in Ubuntu 11.04?

A friend of mine brought me an old laptop and told me to do something with it. Through four years of college, her Gateway MX6123 had been used and abused. She lost the charger, broke the bracket that held the screen on, knocked off the plastic door to the DVD drive, corrupted the hard drive, and who knows what else.

The laptop isn't great, but it's got a 1.5ghz Intel Celeron M processor and 1gb of RAM. I didn't think it would handle Windows 7 all that well, so I decided I would try Ubuntu Linux. Since the hard drive was corrupted, I pulled an extra from another old (and really broken) laptop, stuck it in the MX6123, and fired up a Ubuntu live CD.

The installation booted up fine, but it told me there was no Internet connection. Hmm... strange. I clicked on the network icon in the top bar, and the wireless section was grayed out. I finished the installation, and everything was fine except for two things: I couldn't connect to anything wirelessly, and the built in touchpad mouse wasn't working. Those were pretty significant problems.

The Problem: Broadcom Drivers

After doing some research, I figured out that the problem was a set of Broadcom drivers. I don't know why these drivers aren't included on the install CD, but I guess they have to make some decisions and it's just my luck that the drivers I needed weren't there.

Judging from the message boards, some other people had similar problems. After reading some of these complaints, I found reference to a page in the Ubuntu documentation that explains how to diagnose and solve the problem.

Solving the Problem

Depending on the wireless card built into your laptop, you'll need one of three different drivers. You can determine which model you have by running the command "lspci" in the terminal to list the pci devices currently hooked up to the computer. To make your life simpler, use filter this with the command "lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4". That'll eliminate all other pci devices besides the wireless controller.

That should reveal a model number, and if you're on a different laptop from me you can look back at the Ubuntu documentation to see just what driver you need to install. In my case, the Gateway MX6123 had a BCM4138 card installed. That called for the "b43" version of the drivers.

To install the drivers, I had to find/install the package "firmware-b43-installer." You can do this through the command line, but I found it simple enough to go to the software center, search for "b43" and choose the appropriate package. Note: I had to go online to do this, so I borrowed the hardwire connection from my desktop PC for 5 minutes.

Success?

After I installed the package, the problem was immediately solved. The wireless card started working, it found my network, and I instantly connected to the Internet. I was about to start looking for a solution to my mouse problem... but installing the driver set also fixed the touchpad. Go figure.