One man’s voice

Going wireless with Ubuntu 8.04 & a Broadcom card

Posted on April 26th, 2008 in Geek Stuff, Linux

Ubuntu 8.04 was recently released out of beta. I have been awaiting this release for some time now because this release marks the first time since I can remember in which a Linux OS live install CD came with an installer that actually installs Linux as a Windows application.

So as soon as 8.04 came out of beta I downloaded it. I installed it today. And everything worked as cool as a cucumber out of the box. Except the wireless connection.

A brief search on Google turned up a great tutorial on getting Ubuntu 8.04 to work with a Broadcom wireless adapter on an HP dv6000 series computer. Seeing as my machine is a zv6000 I figured following the instructions was at least worth a shot.

I followed the instructions in the tutorial verbatim with two exceptions. The first is that the apt-get install build-essential did not work. For some reason apt could not find the package so instead I went to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and searched for "build essential", selected it and installed it through the package manager.

The second exception is that I installed the firmware using sudo, which the tutorial did not do.

These are the steps I took:

After running the above processes I rebooted the computer and BINGO! My wireless card started and I was able to connect to my wireless network without incident.

I hope this helps. And I have to give mad props to the original writer of the tutorial, who goes by the name "Christopher" on his blog.