Perhaps one of the better uses of this blog would be to make myself mental notes for the future when it comes to fixing problems, since whenever I stumbled upon them 6 months down the line I've completely forgotten what I did the first time round to fix them, and have to spend another couple of hours doing so.

In today's case it was getting the poxy wireless card in this laptop working under Kubuntu again. 

The card in question is a Broadcom BCM43224, found if the Dell Latitude E6410. Interestingly, on another identical laptop, performing a clean install of 11.10 did not reproduce the problem, it was only the system that was upgraded from 11.04 that failed to show eth1 (or wlan0 for that matter) as an available interface.

One difference noted between the two was the driver in use:

lspci -k | grep BCM43224 --after-context 3                                                                                 
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 000e
        Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge

Cutting to the chase, the solution was as follows:

Uninstall all Broadcom and B43 packages. The do the following:

sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-source
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo rmmod wl
sudo rmmod bcma
sudo modprobe wl

Job's a good'un.