OpenSuse 11.1: Broadcom bcm43xx Wireless Card. Painless installation in 2 steps. January 17th, 2009
Wireless card compatibility and installation is been always one of the down sides of installing Linux in a laptop and thanks to that I got involved in a love-hate relationship with fwcutter and ndiswrapper for a long time. But after Ubuntu 8.04 was released everything changed when it recognised my Broadcom wireless card on the first boot and all the steps to blacklist drivers and extract firmwares faded in the past.
Yesterday, I installed OpenSuse 11.1 in my laptop in order to give KDE 4.1 a try and I faced the fact that it did not recognise my wireless card after the installation. At that point I had to decide between going through the pain of getting the drivers, extracting the firmware and so on or just do some more research to find out if this new version of OpenSuse has a simple way of doing it. After some research I found a solution:
Just run this:
/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware
After it is done restart the network service.
/etc/init.d/network restart
It worked perfectly.
It seems that this new script is part of the distribution in order to make this process simpler but still not as automated as Ubuntu.
Tags: bcm43xx, Linux, OpenSuse, OpenSuse 11.1, Wireless Card installation
Posted in Linux, OpenSuse, Tips, Uncategorized | Comments (46)
January 18th, 2009 at 4:41 AM
Just a note – I believe what Ubuntu actually does is use the Broadcom proprietary driver, http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php . You can install it relatively easily on other distributions too. I don’t know if there’s a known-good package for SUSE.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:11 AM
Holy hell yes!!!! Thank you!!!! That was the most painless openSUSE install ever now.
I’ve been using openSUSE on my laptop for a while now, and while I like the distro in general, having to remember where I put my notes on wireless each time I upgrade was a hassle I dreaded. ndiswrapper never seemed to work well for me, so I had to go the fwcutter route. Or maybe it was the other way around, I can’t remember!
Now if they included this great utility, I wonder why openSUSE didn’t just install it to begin with?? If it was a licensing issue, I’d hope it would at least pop up a message on install offering to install the drivers along side a licensing disclaimer or somesuch.
Oh yeah, thank you!!!!!
January 24th, 2009 at 4:38 PM
You have to be connected to the internet, the script downloads the required files. Seems that B43 and B43 Legacy come from different sources. I had to run “firmware” command a couple of times to get the B43 (”mirror2.openwrt.org”) to work. After both were downloaded and installed my wireless is back up and running… Thanks for the info.
January 24th, 2009 at 5:14 PM
[...] OpenSuse 11.1: Broadcom bcm43xx Wireless Card. Painless installation in 2 steps. [...]
February 1st, 2009 at 10:10 AM
Hi There,
Thanks foor the tips. There is only one problem: I’m not connected to the internet at all. I can’t get my rtl8139 ethernet working in Suse 11.1 and because of that i can’t follow the two steps above! Is there an easy (maybe the same way as described above) way to get my rtl8139 ethernet connection working? I’m pretty new to Linux and suse so any help is appreciated.
Thanks!
February 5th, 2009 at 6:39 AM
Hello,
You need more rest i think
Thanks
Dirnov
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February 9th, 2009 at 9:50 PM
You just became my new best friend. I could never get that stoopid ndiswrapper thing to work, so I’ve been using Ubuntu for the last year and a half. (Not that there’s anything /wrong/ with that…)
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March 16th, 2009 at 10:23 PM
Hello,
I have already seen it somethere…
Have a nice day
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March 26th, 2009 at 9:34 AM
After hours of configuring with yast and scralling the web i come across this and sort wireless in 20 secs and 2 simple comands. LEDGEND!!!!
THANKS
March 28th, 2009 at 11:21 AM
Thanks, worked first time, no problems.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:58 PM
These are great.
May 1st, 2009 at 6:34 AM
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June 4th, 2009 at 7:13 PM
Original post by mattusximus
June 6th, 2009 at 8:11 AM
My laptop’s not wired to the internet so there is no way these steps work for me. Could anyone let me know how i could do it manually step by step as I’m new to Linux so not that knowledgable on what’s going on.
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