bcmwl-kernel-source fails to install if Nvidia card present in the absence of a network connection

[Jack Howarth]

When enabling the proprietary packages option on the Ubuntu installation of xenial, bionic or cosmic x86_64 on a machine with both a wireless card requiring the bcmwl-kernel-source package and an additional Nvidia card present, the installation of the bcmwl-kernel-source package doesn't occur. While the current installer doesn't allow the selected proprietary driver packages to be viewed priorto completing their installation, I assume the problem is, for a machine without a network connection, that only the bcmwl-kernel-source package is available on the Live iso image and that the absence of the nvidia packages is fouling the installation of the bcmwl-kernel-source package.

This issue was discovered on a MacPro 3,1 which originally had a ATI HD2600-XT graphics card as well as an Airport Extreme card. For that combination, the xenial, bionic and cosmic installers all were able to install the bcmwl-kernel-source package when proprietary driver package installation was enabled in the installer. After swapping out that ATI graphics card for a Nvidia GTX-680, I found that the xenial, bionic and cosmic installers now failed to install the bcmwl-kernel-source package in the presence of the Nvidia card without access to a network connection during the installation. So I believe that the installer needs to be more careful not to demand installation of proprietary driver packages that are not present on the Live image in the absence of a network connection.

Currently, one has to either connect the machine to the ethernet to allow for network access to the repos for the installation of the bcmwl-kernel-source package to succeed or manually install the bcmwl-kernel-source package and its dependencies from the appropriate sub-directories in the pool directory of the Live usb image afterwards.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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