How To Fix No Wireless Network In Ubuntu

After dual booting MacBook Air with Ubuntu, when I logged in to Ubuntu, I found that Ubuntu did not detect any wireless network. Networking was on but it said ‘no network devices available‘.

Indeed it is a common issue with Broadcom network adapters in Ubuntu. A relief is that Ubuntu provides additional drivers specifically for Broadcom adapters. But the issue is that to install additional drivers in Ubuntu you will need a network connection. If you have a wired connection, it will be very easy to install the additional drivers. But if you are restricted to the wireless network only, you’ll have to look for alternate methods.

Since there are no Ethernet ports in MacBook Air and I didn’t want to buy an additional accessory just for this, as an alternate, I used the Ubuntu ISO image which I had used for installing Ubuntu. Let’s see how to fix no wireless network in Ubuntu by installing additional drivers from CD-ROM.

Fix no wireless network detected in Ubuntu

First, find out the network adapter in your system. You can refer to this article to find out the make of wireless network adapter in Linux. In fact, you can just check in Software Sources if there are any additional drivers available for your system or not. If there are propriety drivers available, this method will easily work for you. Also, you will need the ISO image of the same Ubuntu version.

Step 1:

Get the ISO image of Ubuntu. If you just had a fresh install, you must have this ISO image in some other system or same system in another OS in dual boot. Copy it to an external device such as USB or DVD. Just copy it, don’t burn it as bootable USB.

Now boot into Ubuntu and copy this Ubuntu ISO image to your home directory.

Step 2:

Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and use the following commands:

sudo mkdir /media/cdrom
cd ~
sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-* /media/cdrom

Basically, we just manually mounted the ISO image as if it was a CD.

Step 3:

Go to Unity Dash and look for Software & Updates:

In the first tab Ubuntu Software, check the option of CD Rom with Ubuntu…

It will ask for your password and reload the software sources. Next is to go in the Additional Drivers tab and select the propriety driver and click on Apply Changes.