Wireless Drivers for Broadcom BCM 4321 (14e4:4329) will not stay connected to a wireless network
- by Eugene
So, I'm not necessary new to Linux, I just never took the time to learn it, so please, bare with me.
I just swapped out one of my wireless cards from one computer to another. This wireless card in question would be a "Broadcom BCM4321 (14e4:4329)" or actually a "Netgear WN311B Rangemax Next 270 Mbps Wireless PCI Adapter", but that's not important. I've tried (but probably screwed up in the process) installing the "wl" , "b43" and "brcmsmac" drivers, or at least I think I did. Currently I have only the following drivers loaded:
eugene@EugeneS-PCu:~$ lsmod | grep "brcmsmac\|b43\|ssb\|bcma\|wl"
b43 387371 0
bcma 52096 1 b43
mac80211 630653 1 b43
cfg80211 484040 2 b43,mac80211
ssb_hcd 12869 0
ssb 62379 2 b43,ssb_hcd
The main issue is that with most of the drivers available that I've installed, they will find my wireless network but, they will only stay connected for about a minute with abnormally slow speed and then all of a sudden disconnect. Currently, the computer is hooked into another to share it's connect so that I can install drivers from the internet instead of loading them on to a flash drive and doing it offline.
If anyone has any insight to the problem, that would be awesome. If not, I'll probably just look up how to install the Windows closed source driver.
Edit 1: Even when I try the method here, as suggested when this was marked as a duplicate, I still can't stay connected to a wireless network.
Edit 2: After discussing my issue with @Luis, he opened my question back up and told me to include the tests/procedures in the comments. Basically I did this:
Read the first answer of the link above when this question was marked as duplicate which involved installing removing bcmwl-kernel-source and instead install firmware-b43-installer and b43-fwcutter.
No change of result and contacted Luis in the comments, who then told me to try the second answer which involved removing my previous mistake and installing bcmwl-kernel-source
Now the Network Manger (this has happend before, but usally I fixed it by using a different driver) even recognizes WiFi exist (both non-literal and literal). Luis who then suggested sudo rfkill unblock all
rfkill unblock all didn't return anything, so I decide to try sudo rfkill list all. Returns nothing (no wonder rfkill unblock all did nothing).
I enter lsmod | grep "brcmsmac\|b43\|ssb\|bcma\|wl" and that returns nothing.
Try loading the driver by entering sudo modprobe b43 and try lsmod | grep "brcmsmac\|b43\|ssb\|bcma\|wl" again. Returns this:
eugene@Eugenes-uPC:~$ sudo modprobe b43
eugene@Eugenes-uPC:~$ lsmod | grep "brcmsmac\|b43\|ssb\|bcma\|wl"
b43 387371 0
bcma 52096 1 b43
mac80211 630653 1 b43
cfg80211 484040 2 b43,mac80211
ssb_hcd 12869 0
ssb 62379 2 b43,ssb_hcd
So to recap: Currently Network Manager doesn't recognize Wireless exists, b43 drivers are loaded and I've currently hardwired a connect from my laptop to the computer that's causing this.
