BCM4306 Won't Connect To Access Point
 

I have a BCM4306 wireless chipset. I was able to connect to my router just fine. I have the drivers installed with ndiswrapper. I restarted my computer, now it won't access my router at all. I didn't change anything in the configuration. It just won't work. What can I do without reinstalling the driver? Thanks.

Did you, perhaps, update your kernel? Newer kernels may include the FOSS B43 driver (although you need to extract the firmware microcode from a legal Windows driver), and B43 and ndiswrapper cannot both access the BCM4306 at the same time.

Look at the output of the dmesg command to see which drivers were loaded for your wireless device, and the output of ps -e to see if you have a ndiswrapper process and a b43 (or bcm43xx) process running.

Note: The closest thing to a Debian release I use is Kubuntu, and I don't use that on my laptop, so my comments re "kernel update" are pure speculation.

Ok, I didn't update my kernel. I downloaded a bunch of software, but I didn't update the kernel.

Did you install the software you downloaded? If so, a suspicion would be that one of those new (or updated) installations has, somehow, buggered your wireless connection.

Perhaps a review of your recent download, installation and update history would provide you with a clue. Was anything you installed or changed related to networking? If so, try disabling it to see if that restores your BCM4306.