WiFi not working in Acer Aspire v5-122p 0646 with v22.04

[ederueda]

Dear Community,

I'm quite new to Linux. I'm trying to be able to use an old Acer Aspire v5-122p 0646 laptop where Windows is lagging constantly, and, after installing Ubuntu 22.04, the system doesn't shows the WiFi icon neither has Internet.
I've run the lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3 command to see the network card and I get a Broadcom BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01).
Besides that, I've used the keyboard combination to "disble and enable the WiFi", but still the same.

The laptop has no rj45 connector, so the WiFi card is the only way to connect to the Internet.

Can you please help me to set it up?

Thanks a million in advance!

 

[Brickwizard]

Welcome to the forums

you may be in luck, the BCM 43*** drivers should be there,
open menu
open all applications
find and click on additional drivers and let it run and if it finds the BCM driver set, select and enter

 

[ederueda]

Welcome to the forums

you may be in luck, the BCM 43*** drivers should be there,
open menu
open all applications
find and click on additional drivers and let it run and if it finds the BCM driver set, select and enter

Thanks for replying so quickly. Anyway, when I go to Additional Drivers, it appears empty with a "No additional drivers available"... any other ideas? Thanks a lot in advance

 

[Brickwizard]

ok do you have a mobile phone with data contract [or one you can borrow from a family member]
Tether the phone to the laptop
open menu, open software manager, in the search type b43,
select b43 legacy installer and install

 

[osprey]

To see if the b43 driver is on your system run:

find /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel -name "*" | grep b43

If its there, load it with:

modprobe b43

Then see if the networking software sees it. You could try the b43legacy driver as well if b43 fails.

If the driver is not there, you need to install it. The driver is present in later kernels so if your kernel doesn't have it, consider upgrading the kernel.

The kernel usually loads the driver at boot if it sees the broadcom hardware and has the driver in the filesystem, so if it is there, it's unclear what is happening.

 

[ederueda]

ok do you have a mobile phone with data contract [or one you can borrow from a family member]
Tether the phone to the laptop
open menu, open software manager, in the search type b43,
select b43 legacy installer and install

Hi. With that I could download the drivers but it's not working either. Thanks

 

[ederueda]

To see if the b43 driver is on your system run:

find /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel -name "*" | grep b43

If its there, load it with:

modprobe b43

Then see if the networking software sees it. You could try the b43legacy driver as well if b43 fails.

If the driver is not there, you need to install it. The driver is present in later kernels so if your kernel doesn't have it, consider upgrading the kernel.

The kernel usually loads the driver at boot if it sees the broadcom hardware and has the driver in the filesystem, so if it is there, it's unclear what is happening.

Thanks for the advise. The drivers now seem to be present for b43 and now also for b43 legacy. Anyway, when I try to load it I get the message "ERROR: could not insert 'b43' : Operation not permitted". Thanks again for your help

 

[Brickwizard]

"ERROR: could not insert 'b43' : Operation not permitted

it would appear you have secure boot enabled,
Disable in UEFI / BIOS and try again

 

[osprey]

Thanks for the advise. The drivers now seem to be present for b43 and now also for b43 legacy. Anyway, when I try to load it I get the message "ERROR: could not insert 'b43' : Operation not permitted". Thanks again for your help

That error normally appears if the user is not root. Root is needed to load modules. If you did use root, then there is some other issue that interfering.

 

[Deleted member 108694]

"ERROR: could not insert 'b43' : Operation not permitted"

Yes as @Brickwizard has stated check to see if Secure Boot is turned on in the BIOS -
This usually does the trick, BUT, in some notebooks, the option does not appear(or is disabled/greyed out) until you set the administration password for the bios.

 

[Kumar_Srinivasan]

I have the exact same driver which this guy has and i have done everything, i have disabled the secure boot, ran these above cmds in terminal, and still i do not have my wifi, but on the additional drivers section i do have a proprietary drivers which i installed and even then the wifi problem didn't get fixed.

I have done everything that was avl on the internet the broadcom 14e4:65 ones are so so proprietary.

 

[osprey]

An alternative to internal wifi that fails to work is to get a usb wireless adapter. The main knowledge one needs is the identity of the chipset and/or the driver so that one gets a dongle that is known to work. These sites may be helpful: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers, https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi, http://linux-wless.passys.nl/index.php.

 

[Deleted member 108694]

If you open your Synaptic Package Manager and in the search block type in - firmware b43 - and see what pops up and see what is installed

 

[osprey]

Thanks for the advise. The drivers now seem to be present for b43 and now also for b43 legacy. Anyway, when I try to load it I get the message "ERROR: could not insert 'b43' : Operation not permitted". Thanks again for your help

Another thought: is this driver in the initramfs? If it isn't when you boot up, then it won't load despite it being in the filesystem. To find out run:

lsinitramfs -l /boot/initramfs -l /boot/initrd.img-$(uname -r) | grep -i b43

If it's not in the initramfs, you can rebuild the initramfs, as root, with:

update-initramfs -u

which updates the latest kernel initramfs, which I expect is the one in use on the system. If not, adjust accordingly with the -k option to specify the exact initramfs in the /boot directory.

The new initramfs file can be checked with the first command above, and if the b43 is there, reboot the system.