TL:DR; If your 13.04 install looks like the wireless is connected, you can ping after connecting but cant after a little bit of time and you have a broadcom wireless card that identifies as pci.id 14e4:4311 (lspci -nn) – keep reading.
I installed Xubuntu 13.04 this morning on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 1564, Core i3, 4gb Ram etc etc). I noticed during the installation that it was hung up trying to download fresh packages so I just skipped that part and let the installer do its thing and figured that I would just update later.
It wasn’t necessarily a surprise to me that the wireless might not work right away as I’ve had to do similar adjustments in other OS’ like Fedora or Mint.
Well…this one was a little different than just plain old “not working.” Initially it would connect, you can ping, visit sites…and then about 5 minutes later you can’t really do anything network-wise. You can ping localhost, but not even the router/ap it says you’re still connected to.
“ip addr” show you have a valid IP and netmask and all that.
So first I verify the wirelss card
josh@yardlobster$ lspci -nn | grep 0280
05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
And I figure I just need to install the right driver like I’ve had to before, and it’s usually in the repos anyways. I plug in a cable and then try to install “bcmwl-kernel-source” like I normally do to fix this. But Ubuntu’s all like “Hey Bro, I’ve already got that, and it’s the latest version.” So I figure I’ll remove –purge and reinstall, which completes but doesn’t solve the issue after a reboot.
I start googling at that point and start seeing some similar issues posted in ubuntu 13.x beta support threads etc. One of them suggests to install “linux-firmware-nonfree.” I figure I want to understand what all is included…and after an hour of looking through gentoo, arch, debian, mint and ubuntu posts and threads all I can see is people recommending to install it (mostly for TV tuner cards) but no info on who maintains it or the depth of what’s in it. I’m going to continue to track that down, but it does solve the problem.
josh@yardlobster$ sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
...
josh@yardlobster$ sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree
...