Fix BCM4311/4312/4321/4322 Wireless in openSUSE 11.1 and earlier

In openSUSE 11.1, 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”. Broadcom has released a linux version of its driver both 32-bit (x86) and 64bit (x86_64) editions for BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321 & BCM4322 Wireless cards. A 1-click install Yast Metapackage file (YMP) is available for install from Packman which makes it easy to get your wireless up and running in no time.

While this procedure is written for openSUSE 11.1, it should just work fine for openSUSE 11.0, openSUSE 10.3 as well as the 1-click install supports these versions.

Check the install Wireless module to confirm it is one of the above listed Broadcom Wireless devices.

openSUSE11_1:~ # lspci|grep -i broad
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)

Click this to download and automatically start YaST Package manager. Click Next on the installation Welcome screen and click “Customize” on the screen showing the Repository and the packages selected to install. Click Next on the repository selection and screen.

And finally, in the screen showing the list of packages selected to install, untick the drivers for custom Kernels like Kernel-pae, Kernel-trace & Kernel-xen (unless you use any of these Kernel versions than the default one).

This means you will untick the following:

Broadcom-wl-kmp-pae
Broadcom-wl-kmp-trace
Broadcom-wl-kmp-xen

and finally, click Next on the proposal screen. This will start adding the packman repository and download and install the required driver packages and required dependencies. Click Finish when the drivers have successfully installed on your openSUSE.

Now, insert the installed wireless module

openSUSE11_1:~ # modprobe wl

Now, confirm the Kernel module is loaded on your openSUSE

openSUSE11_1:~ # lsmod | grep wl
wl                   1080320  0
ieee80211_crypt         6476  2 ieee80211_crypt_tkip,wl

Confirm with the iwconfig command:

openSUSE11_1:~ # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

pan0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:””
Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm
Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
Power Managementmode:All packets received
Link Quality=5/5  Signal level=0 dBm  Noise level=0 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

You are now ready to go, you should already see your KNetworkManager adjusting itself to insert the wireless (eth1 in my laptop) into its list of active devices.

From KnetworkManager, click “New Connection” and select your wireless device (eth1) in my laptop, select your Wireless Network from the list of scanned networks (or manually enter the details if your Wireless network doesn’t broadcast), click next and enter your Encryption details and click Connect & Save. You should now be up and running with your Wireless.

openSUSE11_1:~ # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:”SKY12345″
Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:11:42:F3:AA:6E
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm
Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
Power Managementmode:All packets received
Link Quality=5/5  Signal level=-29 dBm  Noise level=-89 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:14  Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

pan0      no wireless extensions.