Making Wireless Work on a Dell D600 with Ubuntu

I recently inherited an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop, but the wireless wasn't working on it. After some investigation, I learned that it somehow didn't have a wireless card! Digging around for my D600 ($14.00). When it arrived, I carefully installed it into the Mini PCI bay (pictured below).

Since the computer is fairly old (over five years old), I wanted to wipe Windows XP off of it, and run some kind of Linux. I chose Ubuntu because I enjoy using the Drupal Quickstart project, which is an Ubuntu virtual machine. I burned an Ubuntu "live" CD, and booted into Ubuntu's Unity.

The fun started when I realized that support for the wireless Mini PCI card wasn't a standard part of Ubuntu. I saw the "device not ready (firmware missing)" message.

I quickly found Ubuntu's community page on wifi drivers, and after identifying my card via lspci, I followed the section for the b43 driver. (For all of these steps, I was connected to my router via an Ethernet cable.)

I thought I was following the right steps, but the wireless continued to not work. After reading the page over (and over again) I realized I was skipping an important step. In the section "Installing b43 drivers", I was guided to install the b43-fwcutter and firmware-b43-installer. I was never able to find the firmware-b43-installer (I kept getting the "Unable to locate package firmware-b43-installer" error from apt), but the b43-fwcutter was successfully installed. I thought I was stuck, but it turned out that I still needed to download the firmware!

This step is described in the "b43 - No Internet access" section. Because I had Internet access, I thought I didn't need to follow this section, but I did. Reading the Linux Wireless b43 page (which I got from the Broadcom 43xx Linux Driver page) made me realize that I had to run the b43-fwcutter program. In the "No Internet access" section, I was guided to grab two files (comprising the firmware): wl_apsta.o and wl_apsta_mimo.o. (The last file is inside a compressed tar file.) I then followed these instructions to run b43-fwcutter:

The output of the above two commands was this:

The above was the key. The bw43-fwcutter is a "firmware cutter", a tool to extract firmware from Broadcom 43xx driver files (object files). Once I downloaded the driver files, and extracted the firmware via b43-fwcutter, I executed the modprobe b43 commands on the Ubuntu WifiDocs page, and that made it work!

Post Script: All of the above was done with the "live" CD. When I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the laptop's hard drive (wiping Windows XP), the apt was not able to find and install the b43-fwcutter. I had to download the b43-fwcutter package manually (from launchpad.net). Double-clicking on the package caused the Ubuntu Software Center to install the b43-fwcutter, and from there I followed the steps from before.