Installing Wireless in Ubuntu

When installing Ubuntu (and it's many variants) on older hardware, it is often the case that the wireless drivers do not work without some tinkering.  There are too many different cards out there to write a set of instructions on how to install every card, therefore I will focus on the steps required to install network cards on my old Dell laptops, all running a Broadcom network cards.

The steps below show the steps required to install Broadcom drivers on Ubuntu:

1. Identify the installed hardware, by typing:
       lspci -vnn | grep Network
2. On my Dell D620, this returned the following:
       Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
   It is the BCM4311 part we are interested in.
3. Remove the currently installed Broadcom drivers:
       sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
4. Update the software list:
       sudo apt-get update
5. Install the correct firmware.  Since, the output in step #2 reported "BCM4311", I require the "b43" version of the firmware:
       sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
6. Reboot

Upon starting the machine, a list of available wireless networks should be available.