Dell 1390 wireless (BCM4311) Ubuntu 12.04 no wireless icon in unity

My problem appears to be that in a machine with both a BCM43xx wireless and BCM44xx wired connection, the driver for the wired connection requires the generic 'ssb' module, which grabs the resources needed by both, expecting the final drivers to cooperate with it (?). Unfortunately, broadcom's 'wl' driver (which is the driver I had installed) does not cooperate in the way it expects; only the open-source 'b43' driver is capable of doing this.

This bug seems to be related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/197558

A workaround of the same general kind as the one proposed in comment #4 of that bug would presumably have worked for me, but simpler was to switch to using the 'b43' driver rather than 'wl'. To that end, I blacklisted 'wl'. Once that was done, I added 'b43' to /etc/modules, and the 'b43' driver then loaded automatically at startup, and everything worked smoothly.

Don't know if you're still looking for an answer but the answer here...

How to make my Dell 1390 wlan minicard work

...fixed it for me in a new 12.04 LTS installation on an Inspiron 1520 with the 1390 WLAN card.

Here are the important commands...

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

...which worked perfectly for me.

Hope this helps.