13 Jan 2010

[Solved] Wireless Driver for Compaq CQ40 (bcm4312)

Trying out ubuntu in our new office laptops the Compaq CQ40, I found out that the wireless driver was not working. To find out the actual wirelss device installed in the system I tried the following commands:

1. lshw -C network

This gave me the product result as BCM4312 802.11b/g from Broadcom Corporation. Tried a lot of googling and found that you could download a file from broadcom here. And do the following! While this works for me.

Try the following while being root!

# Removing previous instances of wireless drivers if any
2. lsmod | grep "b43\|ssb\|wl"
3. rmmod b43
4. rmmod ssb
5. rmmod wl

# Prepare the device driver from the file that you've downloaded
6. cd to the downloaded file
7. make clean
8. make

# Blacklist previous drivers
9. echo "blacklist ssb" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
10. echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
11. echo "blacklist wl" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

# Install the driver
12. modprobe lib80211
13. insmod wl.ko

:-)