Wireless drivers have always been a bit of an issue in Ubuntu on my MacBook. The 11.04 version seems to have this solved this for the most part as it’s auto installable in the Additional Drivers settings. However I’ve been exploring Kubuntu due to some slight dissatisfaction with the default desktop situation this release. I know there’s a lot of hate for Unity, and I’m not jumping on that bandwagon quite yet… but there are issues to be solved. That’s kind of beside the point though. I did have some issues with wireless under Kubuntu. The Broadcom wireless device doesn’t seem to show up in the Additional Drivers dialog, and it certainly doesn’t work out of the box. The missing piece seems to be the firmware for the device. The resolution turned out to be simple. I used synaptic, but use your package manager of choice.

-Install firmware-b43-installer
-Once that is complete, completely re-install bcmwl-kernel-source
-Enjoy.

Now the only thing left is figuring out why the KDE network management widget is, while stunning, very touchy.