OK, regrets for the delays, and now may not be a good time if northern folk are tired, so we can leave the following until you, in particular, Harry, are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, if you prefer.
First up, I would like the OP (that's you, Harry) to make the acquaintance of SPM - Synaptic Package Manager - and check for me whether a couple of packages are there or not, and what is their status? If I am not mistaken, Synaptic now ships installed under the Mint 18 dot series, and so you can find it at Menu - Administration - Synaptic, or just go to Menu and start to type Synaptic. You enter the same password as you use in Terminal.
It looks as follows:
SCREENSHOT 1 - Synaptic at launch
You can drag and drop the corners and sides, top and bottom to get more viewable space where text spools off the window edge.
For the benefit of The Viewers, if you are using a Debian-based Linux Distro, that is, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others, Synaptic will be in your Repositories (which is what Synaptic shows), but if not installed, at Terminal:
Code:
sudo apt-get -y install synaptic
... will do the trick.
SCREENSHOT 2 - Synaptic's Description of Synaptic
The 1st screenshot looked a little daunting with all the categories. That gets better as we progress. In the 1st shot, my mouse cursor was near Search (magnifying glass), that is where we search from. Forget the Filters for now, learn about them later.
So I have clicked Search and type in "synaptic" without the quotes to see that Synaptic is installed (sounds Irish, I know), then highlighted it by clicking anywhere in the same line, and the bottom pane, which I have expanded, gives a good synopsis or summary of the package.
Don't do this straight away, Harry, but these are the packages I want you to check on:
- bcmwl-kernel-source
- b43-fwcutter and
- firmware-b43-installer
My searches yield the following results, in my 64-bit edition of Linux Mint 18.3 'Sylvia' Cinnamon. I will just group them as Screenshots 3 - 5, and you will see at the left that my Search results are being captured as I go, for
this session of Synaptic.
SCREENSHOTS 3 - 5 -Search Results
Now would be a good time for you to perform this for yourself, but first take a look at Synaptic's Menu at top, click Help and then Icon Legend - this will get you used to identifying the status of packages that you have, and/or want to install.
From that legend, we can see that with my 3 searches, on
my system -
- bcmwl-kernel-source is Available, Supported (by Linux Mint and its parent, Ubuntu), but not installed
- b43-fwcutter, likewise and
- firmware-b43-installer is Available, Not Supported, and not installed (no idea on that one)
We can talk about Latest Version and Installed Version in another arena.
For now, I would like you to perform your own checks on these 3 packages, and come back to us with your results.
I have to go for now, but I will be back with more.
Cheers
Wizard