[Karmic] BCM wifi driver not working in Dell Inspiron 1525 [Solved]

[Uri Shabtay]

I installed Karmic on two Dell Inspiron 1525 laptops, and in both the wireless driver (Broadcom BCM 802.11b/g) didn't work out-of-the-box.

other than that, when i tried installing it within the Live-CD it installed flawlessly for exactly 5 seconds. after that i had a KERNEL PANIC (more than once -- i checked it, and on both laptops) and i had to manually reboot it.

Installation went by ok, but within the installed system i couldn't install the driver (i pressed activate and besides showing me it's installing, nothing happened).

I solved it by reinstalling with synaptic the following packages:
bcmwl-kernel-source
bcmwl-modaliases
b43-fwcutter

After rebooting, Wi-fi works.

Cheers

[Przemek K. (azrael)]

Can you send us a dmesg output from a livecd session on one of these laptops?
Are you able to tell us what was the root cause of this behaviour?

[Uri Shabtay (uri.shabtay)]

unfortunately i don't know how to do this.. my friend believes it had to do with a failed update.