[Fixed] dell laptops having trouble with WiFi on ubuntu

Few days back I got my laptop for R&D purpose named Dell latitude D830 (I know its outdated). And no wonder on first boot of ubuntu(natty) I discovered that my WiFi is not working. I was having hardware BroadCom BCM4328 802.11/a/b/g/n (rev 03). After searching for long hours on google I found following solution to fix up this and thought it would help you too.

So if you are have any of these wifi driver BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4313-, BCM4321-,BCM4322-, BCM43224-, and BCM43225-, BCM43227- and BCM43228- ie. in short BMC43XX please follow the below steps.

1) go to terminal and type below command

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

2) edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add following lines to it

blacklist bcm43xx

blacklist ssb

3) search on google for bcmw15.inf and download it. I hope you wont find ant trouble finding this.

4) back to terminal and install the driver using ndiswrapper

sudo su

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

5) Add this module to linux kernel

modprobe ndiswrapper

6) Load ndiswrapper kernel module during boot and reboot.

echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules

7) reboot and enjoy :)