Dell Latitude - WiFi Woes

[MichaelJohn]

A friend has a DELL Latitude D430 laptop fitted with a Broadcom Wireless 1490 card. It has had a chequered history having originally been supplied with Windows Vista and then having an (iffy) upgrade to Windows Seven two years ago. Recently it has been running extremely slowly and when I checked it is was infested with viruses. It improved after clearing out ~4000 items of malware but soon slowed down again so the only solution seemed to be a re-install. As they had no original discs I suggested that I install Mint 17.1. This all went smoothly apart from the WiFi not working. Try as I might it just will not work (was working under 7). My most recent attempt was to run:-

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sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer && sudo modprobe -r b43 && sleep 15 && sudo modprobe b43

This goes through apart from hanging when you do “sudo modprobe b43”. The WiFi is still not working and I do not know what to try next. Any ideas gratefully received...

[JeremyB]

As long as LM is installed to the hard drive, just reboot

[MichaelJohn]

As long as LM is installed to the hard drive, just reboot

I did but still no WiFi...

[JeremyB]

Lets see what modules are loaded and what the description is for the wifi chip

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lsmod | egrep 'b43|wl'; lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net; dmesg | grep -i firmware

[MichaelJohn]

The result was:-

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michael@michael-Latitude-D430 ~ $ lsmod | egrep 'b43|wl'; lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net; dmesg | grep -i firmware
wl                   6144826  1
cfg80211              409394  1 wl
09:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1600] (rev 02)
    Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0201]
    Kernel driver in use: tg3
0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g [14e4:4312] (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1490 Dual Band WLAN Mini-Card [1028:0007]
    Kernel driver in use: wl
[    0.399738] acpi PNP0A03:00: [Firmware Info]: MMCONFIG for domain 0000 [bus 00-3f] only partially covers this bridge
[    4.045285] [Firmware Bug]: Duplicate ACPI video bus devices for the same VGA controller, please try module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1"if the current driver doesn't work.
michael@michael-Latitude-D430 ~ $

Not sure how to set up/run module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1"

Thanks for looking...

[JeremyB]

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sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-dkms

Reboot and see if it works

[MichaelJohn]

That worked perfectly! It also seems to have cured the hanging that occured with a reboot. Many thanks JeremyB...