Broadcom BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX Issues

I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my Dell Inspiron 1521 and the LAN/Ethernet card was working perfectly but Ubuntu was displaying a message about not installing the Wireless drivers because it was restricted or something along that line.

I then went to the Synaptic Package Manager, searched for all Broadcom packages and installed them. So far so good.

I restarted my computer and to my surprise, my wireless works but my lan isn't! What the heck could be wrong?

I then uninstalled/removed all the packages I installed earlier hoping my ethernet would start working again but hey, nothing changed. My wireless card works and the ethernet still doesn't.

Is there any way of getting this fixed?

I checked and found my network devices were:

• Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
• Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

Solution 1:

After a lot of sweat I figured it out.

Apparently, installing the new wlan drivers blacklisted the ethernet drivers.

I opened the file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf¹ and commented out the line blacklisting the ethernet adapter (which was b44 by the way).

The file now looks like this:

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb  
# We must blacklist the following modules:  
#blacklist b44      <--Commented out this line
blacklist b43legacy  
blacklist b43  
blacklist ssb  
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS  

End result, the ethernet works like expected. As a matter of fact, I'm replying over ethernet.

¹ My attention has been drawn to the fact that the filename may not be the same on all systems.
One user reportedly found the blacklist data in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43.conf. I am however unable to determine which configuration (version of Ubuntu, OS language, etc) this manifests on.