Hello! I am in a bit of an unusual predicament. I am attempting to get Ubuntu working for a friend on an old laptop. Trouble is, I cannot connect to the Internet on said laptop no matter what I do. Ubuntu says that it is missing the firmware for the wireless card, and it refuses to connect even when I plug an ethernet cable in directly. I downloaded the bcm-kernel-source package onto a USB stick and installed it locally. That made no difference. I then copied over and attempted to install the firmware-b43-installer package. The description for this package (which I didn't read until I opened it in Synaptic on the broken laptop) indicated that it downloaded and installed the firmware for the wi-fi. Since the computer has no method of Internet access, this obviously wasn't viable. My question is whether it is possible to download the firmware files onto my flash drive and install them manually.

Since the laptop in question doesn't have web access, I can't copy-paste command-line output. That said,

You can get out of this. Go to

http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

and read for the 4311. You'll need some broadcom blob, some version of the firmware cutter and it throws out a pile of firmware. Load this firmware into /lib/firmware on the laptop.

That worked. Thank you very much.