How can I get my broadcom wifi card to work?

I have a BCM43142:

01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01) Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:0611] Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18 Memory at b0400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: wl

And I can only get wifi networks to show up with the wl driver, from bcmwl-kernel-source. I blacklisted the other drivers as necessary. When using wl, my connection is often five or six times slower than on Windows, and usually cuts out after about a minute or so. I can reconnect to the network, but then it cuts out again after about a minute. How can I get it to work reliably?

Everything works fine on Windows with this wifi card, and other devices on the network work fine.

I should mention that I'm running 14.10 with all the latest updates.

1 Answer

I believe that one or more drivers that require blacklisting are still loading. Please open a terminal and do:

sudo -i
echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
echo "blacklist bcma" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
echo "blacklist brcmsmac" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
echo "blacklist ssb" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
exit

Reboot and run again:

lspci -v

We hope we see the driver in use is only wl and not bcma, bcma-pci-bridge, etc. and that your wireless works as expected.