After installing ubuntu 16.04 I am getting a very weak wifi signal.
Currently, I am sitting 3-4 feet away from my router and I have only 2 bars of wifi signal on my HP Envy M6 notebook. I have checked my TP-link router with my tablet and phone - they both have full bars.
I also feel that this OS is draining my battery faster than Windows 8 (I'm using a dual boot).
I had the same thing on my Lenovo G570. After upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 (from Ubuntu 12.04) I noticed that Wi-Fi signal became very flaky.
I fixed the issue by enabling proprietary driver for my wireless adapter (see the screenshot below)
The Broadcom BCM43142. Some other Broadcom drivers sure are available in the Debian repos, but this one isn’t. So I did the only sensible thing to do: searched the Web. And here’s the solution.
Note: I assume that you know the basics of apt-get and cd commands.
What’s your chipset?
Open the terminal and run
$ lspci | grep BCM
and check if the output contains BCM43142. If it does, this post is for you.
Get the driver
Run
$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms broadcom-sta-modules
If it freaks out with the first package, just skip that one. Download this deb package.
cd into the directory containing the package.
Install it using
$ sudo dpkg -i wireless-bcm43142-dkms_6.20.55.19-1_amd64.deb
Activate it.
$ sudo modprobe wl
Done. It should work now.
This works perfect for my new envy I5.
I also install wavemon and walk around my house and now i have signal in places where I dont have it.
