A friend had a wireless issue on Linux Mint and asked me for advice. I found many people reporting issues with Broadcom & Intel drivers. Most distributions do not bundle proprietary drivers in their main release. These drivers are however available on the NON-OSS repository. Finding you’re wireless make/model isn’t difficult. Just run “lspci” as root.

lspci

… and the output should be something like this :

00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801IBM/IEM (ICH9M/ICH9M-E) 2 port SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801IBM/IEM (ICH9M/ICH9M-E) 2 port SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 03)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 13)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

From the last line we see the wireless card is a Broadcom BCM4312. My friend’s laptop was running Linux Mint. A little bit of google mining should bring you this : Linux Mint forums. Else you could do:

apt-get update
apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-lpphy-installer

Those having the same issue on Ubuntu could follow instructions from: Ubuntu wiki. Debian users can follow: Debian Wiki. openSUSE Geckos can obtain the drivers already packaged at software.opensuse.org.