Dell Inspiron 5420 wifi drivers PCI ID 14e4:4365

Question

I recently bought a new Dell inpiron. I need it for educational purposes and a wifi connection is really important.

Wifi is working properly in Windows7 but Ubuntu 12.04 is not even detecting the wifi card.

I even tried running via ndiswrapper but unfortunately that is also not working.

Any pointers in this regard will be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

I have the same chipset in my Dell Inspiron 5520. I use Fedora 17. After lot of internet research I compiled the following howto.

First, install development tools like gcc (yum install gcc) if not already installed. Then download the file from this link and do the following steps:

1. sudo yum install dpkg

2. mkdir BCM43142

3. dpkg-deb -x Downloads/wireless-bcm43142-dkms-6.20.55.19_amd64.deb BCM43142

4. cd BCM43142/usr/src/wireless-bcm43142-oneiric-dkms-6.20.55.19~bdcom0602.0400.1000.0400/src/wl/sys

5. sudo yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers

6. vi wl_linux.c

7. around line 46, remove the line #include <asm/system.h>

8. save the file (:wq)

9. cd ../../..

10. make
    Things should work, and you'll have a file called "wl.ko" in the current directory.

11. sudo yum remove broadcom-wl

12. sudo mkdir -p /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra/wl

13. sudo cp wl.ko /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra/wl

14. sudo depmod -a

15. sudo modprobe wl

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=283824

This should work for Ubuntu as well, just change the package names where necessary.

Note: Wireless N is not supported in this driver version.

Answer 2

Re-install the drivers:

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source

Hope it helps.