How to – Broadcom BCM4310 Wireless, HP 530 Laptop, Ubuntu Hardy
After a recent purchase of A HP 530 laptop and 2 weeks of trying to get a budget laptop to work with Vista, it was time to re-format and replace the vista virus with a operating system.
Its a bit of a joke that this laptop got sold with Vista. With 1GB of Ram and a Celeron 1.6Ghz processor it was completely unfit for the purpose of running the installed Vista Home Basic. After an upgrade to 2 GB of Ram and an HP extended 9 cell battery it was still uncapable but with a battery life of an hour and half instead of the “out of the box” forty five minutes battery life. Interestingly after installing Ubuntu Hardy not only did the machines performance become more acceptable as it was not longer struggling with Vista’s bloat, but the surprise for me was that battery life increased to three and a half hours. The unfortunate downside to Ubuntu was that the built in Broadcom BCM4310 wireless card did not work.
The reason that the Broadcom wireless does not work natvely with GNU/Linux systems is that Broadcom amongst many other hardware manufacturers aren’t interested in the smaller percentage of non Microsoft users so will only support Windows drivers. Conveniently we have the ndiswrapper tool at our disposal to let us use these Windows drivers on Linux.
The instructions below will work with both the x86 and x86_64 architecture variations of Ubuntu. The credit for the following information is not mine, but instead Linux friendly Dell from their wiki post .
Open a Terminal window and run the following command:
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils
You will need to blacklist the bcm43xx kernel module by typing this command:
echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Download the driver here:
Install the driver with this command:
sudo ndiswrapper -i /tmp/DRIVER/bcmwl5.inf
Verify that the driver has been loaded:
ndiswrapper -l
The output for the above should loom similar to below:
bcmwl5 : driver installed device (14E4:4315) present
You will need to run the command below to enable this driver to load with your computer at boot:
echo 'ndiswrapper' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
Reboot the laptop and the blue wireless light will turn on, if not you will need to press the button. Now you can use the Network Manger to view and connect to your wireless networks.