Saturday, August 6, 2011

How to setup wireless for Inspiron N3010 in Ubuntu 11.04

It took me a day and the help of allandee from #ubuntu to be able to setup wireless on my laptop, so I decided to write down the steps and put them here in case I or someone else needs them.

First, the laptop comes with Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01), so the instructions are for it.

Here are the steps:
 1. sudo apt-get install git (in case it's not installed)
 2. git clone git://git.bu3sch.de/b43-tools.git
 3. cd b43-tools
 4. make #build the b43-fwcutter binary

 5. cd
 6. mkdir tmp #create a temporary dir for the driver
 7. cd tmp
 8. wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel.tar.bz2
 9. tar -xjf broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel.tar.bz2 #extract the archive
 10. sudo ~/b43-tools/b43-fwcutter -w /libs/firmware/ 
~/tmp/broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel/driver/wl_apsta/wl_prebuilt.o #extract the firmware
 #the line above is wrapped to properly show up on screen 
 11. modprob b43
 a restart might be needed afterwards.
 
This is it.