How to get wifi working properly on the BestBuy HP Pavillion dv6407nr and dv9408ca laptop (Black Friday special)

I bought one of these and it’s pretty sweet but it was a bit of a pain to get the wifi to work properly so I thought I’d jot down how I got it to work.I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) 64 bit version because what’s the point of having a 64 bit processor if you don’t utilize it to the fullest? Okay, so down to the specifics I used a bunch of howto’s that I’ll list as we go along.First things first my laptop came with a Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02).If this is what you have then this will probably work for you (ymmv).The restricted driver (bcm43xx) available through the Ubuntu repository did not work with my card but you can try it and see if you get better results.Not working? Keep reading…

The first thing you need to do is start from a clean slate that means removing any drivers or software you’ve used to attempt getting the card to work this includes removing ndiswrapper.Follow the instructions available at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092 to get started.The dell driver does work (I tried it initially with a 32 bit install) but I decided to use the HP driver available at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp36501-37000/sp36684.exe (this driver package is for 32 bit Windows XP the 64 bit driver for Vista did not work at all for me).Substitute it if you like or not, both should work.To be safe I rebooted after adding ndiswrapper to be started on boot (sudo echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules) .This configuration got me insecure wifi working which is the first step in getting things sorted.

The next step for me was to get wifi working after suspend/hibernate which is actually pretty simple.You’ll need to make network-manager shut down before suspend and restart on resume.I found info on how to do that here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/NetworkManagerunder the topic “Suspend support”.It makes sense, but for some reason it’s not implemented by default, which is a shame.Hopefully now you have working wifi with suspend/hibernate resume working.

The next step is to test WPA/WEP encryption to see if it works.Since network-manager is a pretty sophisticated set of scripts with a gui interface try to enable WEP or WPA encryption through that first.Does it work for you? If so you’re done and enjoy your new laptop.Not working yet? Okay then here’s what to do. I found that this hack works for me [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4311_rev_01_(ndiswrapper)][1] topic Adding WPA Support (optional).Well that’s it enjoy ;-)

[1]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4311_rev_01_(ndiswrapper)