Comment 29 for bug 506816

Just wondering if anyone thinks this could be a bug in bcmwl-kernel-source's use of dkms - there are a bunch of bugs against this driver about it failing to build correctly - I am pretty sure its use of dkms is broken - see this comment I made against bcmwl in another bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bcmwl/+bug/441492/comments/5

Basically last year the nvidia package for karmic was changed (in 185.18.36-0ubuntu5):

nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 (185.18.36-0ubuntu5) karmic; urgency=low

* debian/nvidia-185-kernel-source.postinst:
    - Re-use the smart buildd detection system that we already use in the
      bcmwl-kernel-source package so as to allow pre-compiled modules when
      the nvidia driver is included in a customised image. The old behaviour
      is preserved in any other case.

So it used the same build stuff from bcmwl. Unfortunately this was found to be broken and so was fixed for nvidia later:

nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 (185.18.36-0ubuntu6) karmic; urgency=low

  * debian/nvidia-185-kernel-source.postinst:
    - There were bugs of undefined variables in the smart buildd detection
      scripts. These should be upstream DKMS anyway, so reference them
      from there (LP: #450493)

But bcmwl has not been fixed in the same way - I really suspect this could be a cause or contributing factor to this (and the other bugs)...