Dear Broadcom, Despite your late gesture of opensourcing the bcm43xx wireless drivers, I continue to have issues -- Last week a kernel upgrade from lucid not only broke the driver but managed to kill the nvidia drivers for good measure -- it was easier to take a data backup and do a clean re-installation of Lucid than waste a lot of time figuring out how your bcm43xx driver broke the nvidia drivers killing my graphics display totally. 

However, I was mistaken about it being a kernel upgrade (to 2.6.35) issue as the peace lasted for hardly 3 days -- since I am blessed with having to start my monday morning troubleshooting your broken hardware drivers (on 2.6.32-21 generic kernel version) instead of getting actual work done.
 
lucid@ubuntu:~$ dpkg --list |grep b43
ii  b43-fwcutter             1:012-1build1          Utility for extracting Broadcom 43xx firmwar

lucid@ubuntu:~$ dpkg --list |grep bcmwl
ii  bcmwl-modaliases       5.60.48.36+bdcom-0ubuntu3       Modaliases for the Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA

So the "b43-fwcutter" utility package exists on my system (as I had installed and activated the drivers) but something between each reboot was blocking the drivers as the link would suddenly be hard blocked. This despite me taking the trouble to NOT upgrade from the 2.6.32-21 generic kernel version.

Then, I checked the B43 blacklisted file:

lucid@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/* | egrep '8180|acx|at76|ath|b43|bcm|CX|eth|ipw|irmware|isl|lbtf|orinoco|ndiswrapper|NPE|p54|prism|rtl|rt2|rt3|rt6|rt7|witch|wl'
# which ath5k cannot recover. To prevent this condition, stop
blacklist ath_pci
blacklist eth1394
# replaced by p54pci
blacklist prism54
# replaced by b43 and ssb.
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist uart6850
blacklist twl4030_wdt

and sure enough, "bcm43xx" was indeed on the blacklist.....nice, girdle up for more yakshaving!

Next, I paid a visit to the "blacklist.conf" file and commented out the line "blacklist bcm43xx".

Rebooted for it to take effect. Nada, Zilch, still no wifi.

lucid@ubuntu:/lib/firmware/b43$ ls
a0g0bsinitvals5.fw  a0g1bsinitvals13.fw  a0g1initvals5.fw     b0g0bsinitvals9.fw  lp0bsinitvals13.fw  lp0initvals14.fw    n0initvals11.fw  ucode14.fw
a0g0bsinitvals9.fw  a0g1bsinitvals5.fw   a0g1initvals9.fw     b0g0initvals13.fw   lp0bsinitvals14.fw  lp0initvals15.fw    pcm5.fw          ucode15.fw
a0g0initvals5.fw    a0g1bsinitvals9.fw   b0g0bsinitvals13.fw  b0g0initvals5.fw    lp0bsinitvals15.fw  n0absinitvals11.fw  ucode11.fw       ucode5.fw
a0g0initvals9.fw    a0g1initvals13.fw    b0g0bsinitvals5.fw   b0g0initvals9.fw    lp0initvals13.fw    n0bsinitvals11.fw   ucode13.fw       ucode9.fw

lucid@ubuntu:~$ cd /lib/firmware/brcm
bash: cd: /lib/firmware/brcm: No such file or directory

Then, a sudo ln -s bcm43xx-0-610-809-0.fw bcm43xx-0.fw and sudo ln -s bcm43xx_hdr-0-610-809-0.fw bcm43xx_hdr-0.fw should have loaded and activated the drivers after a reboot. It did not, forcing me to switch to a wired connection on a laptop. WTF!

Broadcom, fiddling with "bcm43xx" is a sure-fire way to kill time. Thankyou very much for the Yak-shaving experience --it serves as a constant reminder to me, why I will never (unknowingly) buy another Broadcom driven product in future, ever! KTHXBAI.

UPDATE:: Its a "networking disabled on boot" bug in Ubuntu-Lucid and Maverick that has a fix (but not yet committed for Maverick):
[0] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1594577
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/524454
[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx#Installing%20b43%20drivers
[3] http://www.qc4blog.com/?p=857

I've tried everything mentioned in the above threads to no avail. Wifi is out cold!