SRU request:
== 14.04 ==
[Impact]
Ubuntu 14.04 ships with a good open replacement for the proprietary driver, which seems to work on many systems that were quietly dropped by the proprietary driver. We should default to the open driver. This will only affect 14.04.1.
[Test Case]
1) If the broadcom driver is already installed, make sure to remove it:
sudo apt-get --purge remove bcmwl-kernel-source
Then reboot.
2) Test the automatic installation using the following command:
ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
and make sure that ubuntu-drivers does not install the broadcom driver
[Regression Potential]
It should be minimal (and affect only 14.04.1). The open broadcom driver should already work out of the box.
Furthermore the test suite now covers this test case.
== 12.04 ==
[Impact]
Kernel versions higher than 3.11 ship with a good open replacement for the proprietary driver, which seems to work on many systems that were quietly dropped by the proprietary driver. We should default to the open driver when this is the case. This will only affect 12.04.5.
[Test Case]
1) If the broadcom driver is already installed, make sure to remove it:
sudo apt-get --purge remove bcmwl-kernel-source
Then reboot.
2) Make sure that "linux-generic-lts-trusty" is installed:
sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-trusty
And reboot.
3) Test the automatic installation using the following command:
jockey-text --auto-install
and make sure that Jockey does not install the broadcom driver
[Regression Potential]
It should be minimal (and affect only 12.04.5). The open broadcom driver should already work out of the box.
Furthermore the test suite now covers this test case.
== Description ==
The propreitory driver Broadcom STA (packaged as 'bcmwl-kernel-source', provides 'wl' kernel module) gets autoinstalled upon Ubuntu 12.04.4 installation on systems with Broadcom BCM4313 (14e4:4727) wireless cards. Upto Ubuntu 12.04.3 with 3.8 kernel, this was good behaviour. But, with 3.11 kernel used in Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 12.04.4, the official open source 'brcmsmac' driver had improved (with the newly implemented AdHoc and AP mode, and other improvements) over propreitory 'wl'. On newer kernel versions, 'brcmsmac' works better than 'wl'.
Autoinstalling the 'wl' driver would actually be a "downgrade" of functionality. I understand that there are some cards work only with 'wl', but it's better not to do autoinstall of 'bcmwl-kernel-source' on the ones supported by 'brcmsmac'. It maybe offered on the jockey Additional Drivers list, though I don't see any reason why anyone would prefer 'wl' over 'brcmsmac' now. I don't know if this issue remains on Ubuntu 14.04LTS's jockey merged with 'ubuntu-drivers' package. But, if it does that has to be fixed too. I hope this issue is fixed soon, so that Ubuntu 12.04.5 is released with the fixed jockey.
In my case, I need to install linux-firmware-
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