Comment 28 for bug 1098225

I just fresh installed Raring on an Inspiron N4010 and ran into this issue. If you have the bcmwl module installed, installing laptop-mode-tools will cause an *immediate* kernel panic, and, as mentioned, leave the system unusable.

To get out of this state, boot into a live environment, chroot into your system, and fix dpkg from there, then removing laptop-mode-tools. Bind only /dev, /proc, and /sys in the chroot. This will cause the system to operate enough to actually fix dpkg and install/uninstall laptop-mode-tools, but not enough to actually operate it, so you can safely recover from the error.

I will try installing saucy's bcmwl later and report back on the results.