Fix Intermittent Wifi in Ubuntu 14.04 on 2013 Macbook Pro (Broadcom 4331)

UPDATE (5/7/2014): It turns out I continued to have connectivity issues, which were exacerbated when I downloaded a large file. After 60mb, it seemed to kill WiFi. I tried reloading the Broadcom drivers and various other things, but it wouldn’t work. Changing to the proprietary drivers under Software & Sources->Additional Drivers fixed the issue for me:

Screenshot from 2014-05-07 14:51:37

My Macbook Pro 13″ was having connectivity issues after the upgrade to 14.04 LTS. It would stay connected to the hotspot, but would not transmit data.

Issuing “$ sudo service network-manager restart” would temporarily resolve the issue, but it was getting annoying doing that every 10 minutes or so.

The fix:

  1. Run these commands:
  2. # modprobe -r b43 && modprobe b43
  3. The reboot.

WiFi should stay connected now.

Fix WiFi on Macbook Pro (Broadcom 4331) for Latest Kernel 3.11.0-19 (Ubuntu)

So, yesterday’s update to the latest kernel (3.11.0-19-generic) broke my Macbook Pro’s WiFi. Here’s how to quickly resolve the issue:

  1. Reboot into a previous Kernel, hopefully WiFi will work again.
  2. Then run these commands:
  3. $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mpodroid/mactel
    $ sudo apt-get update
    $ sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
    $ wget http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
    $ tar xf broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
    $ sudo b43-fwcutter -w "/lib/firmware" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o
  4. Then reboot and you should be able to use the latest kernel with WiFi working once again.