Wireless card not working with Linux Mint...

[starlight849]

My wireless card isn't turning on. Not seeing any networks at all.

iwconifg show
lo no wireless extensions
eth1 IEEE 802.11 Access Point: Not-Associated
Link Quality:5 Signal level:0 Noise Level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc: 0
etho0 no wireless extensions


I have an HP Pavillion dv2000 laptop.
I installed Linux Mint 13 Maya.
I have a Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP_PHY network card

So far I have enabled the driver that Mint provided in the addition drivers menu. It shows Broadcom STA wireless driver and includes my network card in the list of supported drivers.

My wireless still works fine on the windows partition.

[sicarie]

So your laptop has funky touch-lights at the top - is the wireless disabled through this light? The wireless LED should be blue - if it is orange, touch it and it should turn blue.

What is the full output of the following command (run as root or sudo)?

ifconfig

[starlight849]

etho
Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:72:4f:c3: b8
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0.B)
Interrupt:42 Base address:0x8000

lo
Link encap: Local Network
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/138 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1680 (1.6 KB) TX bytes:1680 (1.6 KB)





Thanks so much for you help. I have fiddled with that switch quite a bit.. It's on and it's showing up as blue under my windows partition but it's orange on the mint partition.

[sicarie]

So eth0/eth1 (anything that starts with eth) is short for "ethernet connection 0" or "ethernet connection 1" - in short, these are cabled connections.

My experience with Linux has what you're looking for as labeled as wlan0 - or "wireless LAN connection 0." So we're looking for a wlan entry in the ifconfig output.

With HP laptops the orange and blue lights at the top are actual hardware switches - you can turn them on or off by just touching them.

When Mint boots, are you able to touch the orange light and make it turn blue?

[starlight849]

No... It will not turn blue with the switched turned on.

[sicarie]

I just checked the HP Drivers and Support page - there are no Linux drivers for this - where did you find the driver you installed or what procedure are you using?

[starlight849]

When I went to Hardware --> Additional Drivers Mint detected the Broadcom STA wireless driver...

So there isn't a Linux driver for this wireless card? I'm confused.

[sicarie]

Let me look into it - just because there isn't one linked to HP's page doesn't mean there isn't one at all - it just means HP didn't put their own out there.

What I need to determine is if Mint is good at detecting wireless interfaces automatically, and how to troubleshoot broadcom wlan's.

[starlight849]

Thanks so much :)I really appreciate all of your help on this matter.

[starlight849]

I was wondering if you found out anything more about this wireless card issue?

[sicarie]

Yeah, so it looks like Mint has quite a few issues with Broadcom wireless configs.

The easiest solution may be to switch distros, but that is sacrilege for most Linux users ;)

Please open a Terminal and type in the following

inxi -N

and that should tell us if it's 4311, 4312, 4313, or something else entirely.

Depending if it is one of the three above or not, there are two possible solutions I have found.

[starlight849]

Card-1: Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY driver:wl
Card-2: NVIDIA MCP67 Ethernet driver: forcedeth

[starlight849]

I just fixed it... rfkill unblock all

[sicarie]

Awesome, glad you figured it out! From what I can see, that might not be persistent through a reboot, so if you get sick of putting that in every time, you can try the following (as your card is a 4312)

Linux - Configure Broadcom STA Wireless Drivers (via Tech1w.com)