I brought an old netbook back to life by installing Linux Mint on it.
I had a problem with the networking though: the Broadcom BCM4312 802.11/bg didn’t get recognised. A quick search on linuxwireless.org and found out that:
b43 and b43legacy are drivers for the 802.11 B/G/N family of wireless chips thatBroadcom produces. The choice of which driver your card uses depends on the revision level of the 802.11 core. If your card is a BCM4306 Rev 2 or only has 802.11b capability, it uses b43legacy. All other models use b43. This number is read by the driver ssb, and the correct choice for your device is made at that point. The drivers are called bcm43xx in mainline kernels, and b43 and b43legacy in wireless-2.6 and 2.6.24 and later.
Here are the steps:
Driver Installation:
- Start a terminal window and run:
lspci -vnn -d 14e4:
- Lookup the
PCI-IDcode[14e3:xxxx]on linuxwireless supported drives list - Install correct driver, in my case:
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
I also needed to run the following:
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-lpphy-installer
Voila. Networking!