Comment 16 for bug 1119842

Hi everyone

I've installed Ubuntu 13.10 (Desktop AMD 64 bits - Kernel 3.11.0-17) last week and had the some problem reported by Gabriel (fails to reboot and to power off ; wireless card is not recognized).

I have a laptop Dell Latitude D830 with a Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Minicard (chipset Broadcom BCM 4311 802.11 b/g), since 2007.

I had the latest available version of the 'bcmwl-kernel-source' package (Version: 6.30.223.141+bdcom-0ubuntu1), which was automatically installed with Ubuntu. Since I couldn't have it working at any cost, I removed this package and installed 'linux-firmware-nonfree' (Non-free firmware for Linux kernel drivers) (Version: 1.14ubuntu1), 'b43-fwcutter' (utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmware) (Version: 1:017-2) and 'firmware-b43-installer' (firmware installer for the b43 driver) (Version: 1:017-2), what solved my problem perfectly.

I've also tested other Ubuntu versions on this machine (12.04 LTS AMD64, 13.04 AMD64 and 13.10 i386) and had the exact same problem. However, in 2009 when I had Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) this issue wasn't present. This Broadcom's open-source driver (bcmwl-kernel-source) was released right after on that same year, for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

When you do a bug-report search, right from this Launchpad Ubuntu Bug platform, with the statement "bcmwl-kernel-source", 37 reports are returned, dating from 2010 until now. It seems that this issue is chronic , which ramains since the package was released. I don't know how many kernels and device models are incompatible with this Broadcom driver, neither if it's just a driver version issue or if it's the driver itself (all versions) that is not well adapted to the kernel.

To be honest, I took a week to find where the problem was and make my system work properly. Probably, if I wasn't a free software (open source-code) and Linux/Ubuntu enthusiast, I would have given up at the begening and returned to the convenience of Windows. Failure to have the wireless card working and to reboot and power off properly, are serious problems that may discourage novice users to adopt Ubuntu.

Perhaps there should be created a Graph linking the members of the three groups involved in the issue: hardware device model, kernel version and Broadcom driver version. Members among diferent groups would be linked to each other when a bug between them is present and unsolved. A Graph grafical representation (Graph diagram) could be usefull to help to map and clarify this problem.

I am glad to be a Linux/Ubuntu user and a member of this Ubuntu community! I hope I have helped somehow!

Cheers!!