Hardware Driver Manager

[Paul S]

I've found the jockey-kde sometimes fails to activate or deactivate the 
drivers, but I've always had success with jockey-gtk.  If you don't have 
jockey-gtk installed, install it and then give it a try.  I usually 
start it from the command line, because kde seems to hide the menu entry 
too.  Simply:

$ jockey-gtk

Make sure you pick the STA driver, not the open source fw-cutter.  STA 
will create a module called /lib/modules/<kernel>/volatile/wl.ko

There's a problem also with the improper entry in the 
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43 that it installs.  If you also have the 
broadcom eth0 card that uses the b44 driver, it will install "ssb" 
during boot up and "ssb" will grab the wifi card before "wl" has a 
chance, preventing wl from loading (fixed on jaunty 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/333903, but maybe not hardy or intrepid) 
.. ymmv.

Once you've rebooted, you can check which driver is using it by running 
in a konsole:

$ lshw -C network

The output will include all network cards and their drivers.  If the 
wifi shows it's using the "ssb" module and "b43-pci-bridge" instead of 
"wl" then you know the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43 is not working.

So, replace the contents of that file with:

blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist ssb
blacklist b44
# load wl before b44 so that both work
install wl modprobe -r b43 b44 b43legacy ssb; modprobe --ignore-install 
wl $CMDLINE_OPTS; modprobe --ignore-install b44

Then, remake you're initramfs with this command in a konsole:

$ sudo update-initramfs -v -u all

and reboot.  Recheck with lshw -C network to see if it got the correct 
driver module if it's still not working.  As a last resort, it's also 
easy to build the module from the source from broadcom.

hth,