Testing Lubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Package in: b43-fwcutter

Another possible Citrix thin client candidate.

Having a bad CD day, made a boot USB instead for the Lubuntu 11.04 ISO, using my other laptop's Ubuntu startup disk creator.

Fast boot-up: under 22 seconds - time between turning on the laptop and the user id prompt.
Faster screen display: under 3 seconds - time between hitting the enter key after entering the password, and the LXDE desktop is displayed.

Looks promising.

Just can't get my wifi to work.

Issuing the terminal command:

sudo lshw -C network

yielded the following output:
*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Network controller
product: BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
version: 01
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:d4100000-d4103fff


So how to get the proprietary Broadcom BCM4311 to work?

Many ways to get the driver, I suppose. Another way to do it is:

sudo lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4

which shows this output:
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:0465]
04:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1713] (rev 02)

Ubuntu wifi links to resolve the issue:
1. Ubuntu forum thread
2. Ubuntu Wifi doc

An hour later...

Finally got my WIFI to work, using the 2nd link above as reference, and discovering that my firmware runs on the b43 steps, and NOT the STA at all.

I did NOT activate this: System Tools > Additional Drivers > Broadcom STA wireless driver

This did it for me instead:

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer