SUSE & openSUSE

Tips,Tricks, Tutorials,How Tos and Troubleshooting suse linux

BCM4311/4312/4321/4322 Wireless in openSUSE 11.3

Posted by admin on 22nd October 2010

In openSUSE 11.3, laptops installed with the BCM4311/BCM4312/BCM4321/BCM4322 Wireless LAN cards like the Dell Inspiron 1525 do not have drivers installed and hence do not work out of the box. In Dell this Wireless card is labelled as “Dell 1395 Wireless card”. The broadcom-wl package which contain Broadcom’s IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux® device driver for use with Broadcom’s BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware doesn’t seem to work.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in openSUSE 11.3, Wireless | 4 Comments »

iwevents – Track Wireless events on the Wireless interfaces on your system

Posted by admin on 17th July 2008


iwevents is yet another linux utility which helps track any events related to the Wireless Interfaces on the network. iwevents can monitor for events related to the settings of the interfaces itself. For instance, a change to the encryption key, ESSID etc done via iwconfig command or events related to the hardware itself like the device joining a new Wireless network, scan completion (using iwlist), packet dropped, driver event, node registration, node expiration.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Wireless | No Comments »

iwspy – Check Wireless link quality in Linux by monitoring IP/MAC/Host addresses

Posted by admin on 17th July 2008


iwspy is a linux utility to check the link quality by checking against an IP Address or a Hardware address (MAC-Address) or DNS hostname (resolved through DNS) that is attached to the same Wireless network as the host itself. The reason being it depends on the ARP cache on the system. So, if there is an addresses not in the ARP cache you can then ping once before trying. iwlist can help you to set upto 8 addresses which can be monitored and read back the quality of the link.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Wireless | No Comments »

iwlist – Detailed information from Wireless Interface & Wireless scan in Linux

Posted by admin on 16th July 2008


iwlist command in Linux is used to extract more detailed information from a Wireless Network interface which may not be available from running the iwconfig command. This includes detailed information on available Wireless networks, Frequencies supported, power management support, Encryption key sizes supported, WPA keys configured on the device etc.

The general syntax is

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Wireless | No Comments »

iwconfig – Wireless Interface configuration utility in Linux

Posted by admin on 16th July 2008


Iwconfig like ifconfig is  a Wireless interface configuration utility in Linux.It is used to set the parameters of the  network  interface which are specific to the wireless operation. Iwconfig may also be used to display the parameters and the wireless statistics. iwconfig extracts these information from /proc/net/wireless file.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Wireless | 9 Comments »