[SOLVED] How to get the Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY wireless/WLAN/WiFi adapter working on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr or LinuxMint 17 Qiana - (Tested on a Dell Studio 1435 Laptop)

Submitted by admin on Sun, 06/01/2014 - 08:25

Note: I did this for a friend's Dell Studio 1435 Laptop, while installing the latest LinuxMint 17 Qiana Mate Edition. This should work on Ubuntu / LinuxMint for any machine which has a Broadcom BCM4312 wifi (802.11b/g) adapter.

You can make sure that you have the correct device mentioned here, by typing in the following command in the Terminal: 

lspci | grep -i bcm4312

It should show something like this: 

0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev01)

If this has been confirmed, you can proceed with the following:

Solution:

Run the following commands in Terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

Now reboot your system, and there you should see your WiFi working fine!

--

Let me know using the Comment box below, if you found this useful, or if this didn't work quite as expected - I'll try my best to help you out.

Cheers,
Anto

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Comments

Enlace wifi (not verified)

Wed, 06/11/2014 - 21:25

Thanks for sharing.

Anandarajeshwaran J (not verified)

Thu, 10/23/2014 - 10:49

You saved my day brother.

benshiro (not verified)

Thu, 10/30/2014 - 10:58

Recently acquired a laptop running lubuntu and wireless was not working, but I plugged in the hardline and did the command prompts and it worked perfectly!

Crawley (not verified)

Sun, 04/26/2015 - 13:14

What if I have no way of connecting to the internet other-than wireless.

Dr. Y. Karoli (not verified)

Tue, 07/07/2015 - 13:31

thanks a lot. finally i got my dell inspiron mini 1010 connected to my wi-fi instead of having it connected to LAN everytime

Richard White (not verified)

Thu, 08/20/2015 - 00:34

This is a Dell 1545. I have Linux Mint Rebecca installed. On another hard drive in this same computer, I also have Linux Mint Rebecca, and it has worked for nearly two years.

I wanted to make a clean baseline install to another disk, so I swapped them. The new install will not load the drivers for the BCM 4312. lspci finds the card, no problem, and I ran

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

This ran without error, but the driver still didn't load and ifconfig does not show the wireless adapter.

Then I ran the commands you recommend and rebooted. Still no wireless. Not much luck in an Internet search, either; they all seem to say the same thing, and I have already done all that.

Best regards,
Richard
Austin, Texas

Tim Vaughm (not verified)

Sun, 12/06/2015 - 08:43

Anto,

Thank you for this very helpful posting. I also found some other things that might be helpful.

I am running Linux Mint KDE 17.2 (32-bit) on Lenova S10 netbook. I had much trouble getting the built in WiFi working, but it turned out to be something to fix, involving a couple switches and completely turning off the computer.
On some laptop there are switches to control the wifi adapter. One type of switch is called "Hard" WiFi switch which is a hardware switch which is not usually part of the regular keyboard. I have a Lenova S10 netbook with a green hardware wifi switch located near the power switch above the keyboard. This particular laptop also has a function key (F5) to contol the wifi as well. Both switches have to be "on" for the wifi to function ! You can see the state of these switches by typing "rfkill list" in the console (terminal). It will list something like (with other stuff):

2: brcmwl-0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes

In the above case the hardware wifi switch has turned off the wifi.
Turn turn it back on you can press the hardware wifi switch and then type "rfkill list" in the console again. It should be unblocked.

Also there is utility you run from the console called "mintwifi". That might be helpful. See:

http://www.wikihow.com/Set-up-a-Wireless-Network-in-Linux

Another strange thing that happened, as reported by others, was that I found that even though I had the wifi turned on according the "rfkill list" command, I had to shut down the computer, remove the battery, try turning it on without the battery to discharge the capacitors, then reinsert the battery. When I turned the computer on the wifi appeared on the network manager on the system tray. See:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1946474&p=11974636#post11974636

Hope that helps
Tim

danni (not verified)

Sun, 07/09/2017 - 20:18

Not working, I'm using laptop dell inspiron 1525 & ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS

admin

Wed, 03/07/2018 - 21:00

What is the output of the terminal command 'lspci'?

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