I’m new here and this is my first post, so please let me know what I can do better... Anyways, I have been using an Acer Aspire 5750 running Ubuntu 18.04. Recently, it crashed hard and I had to reinstall Ubuntu. No big deal, I had backed everything up. It has a Broadcom 43227 wireless chip installed. Previously, I installed the driver with the firmware-b43-installer package. This time, I tried to do the same thing, but I got the message saying that the package was not found. I tried this several times on different computers, same results. I looked on packages.ubuntu.com and the package was also missing there. Has anyone else had this problem? Is that package just gone? What would I do if it were?

2 Answers

Check to make sure that the multiverse repository is enabled. Then run apt install --simulate firmware-b43-installer without sudo and not as root to simulate installing the firmware-b43-installer package without actually installing anything.

$ apt install --simulate firmware-b43-installer
NOTE: This is only a simulation! apt needs root privileges for real execution. Keep also in mind that locking is deactivated, so don't depend on the relevance to the real current situation!
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed: b43-fwcutter
The following NEW packages will be installed: b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Inst b43-fwcutter (1:019-3 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic [amd64])
Inst firmware-b43-installer (1:019-3 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic [all])
Conf b43-fwcutter (1:019-3 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic [amd64])
Conf firmware-b43-installer (1:019-3 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic [all])

It appears that firmware-b43-installer can be installed from the default repositories with sudo apt install firmware-b43-installer in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu.

1

Nowadays, it's in a package named linux-firmware-nonfree. Rebuild your package index before you go to get it, just in case. Do both with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

1

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