16. Wireless Driver Installation
Most of the time wifi will just work out of the box. In these cases you'll be able to configure your wireless card using the NetworkManagement widget which you should find running in your system tray.
16.1 Find Out Which Chipset
If your wireless card isn't supported out of the box, chances are you can make it work fairly easily.
The first step is running this command to find out which chipset is on the card. The chipset is what matters, the make and model of the device is basically of no importance.
hwinfo --wlan --short

Now that you know which chipset is on your card, you can start figuring out what is required to make the chipset work in openSUSE - usually you'll just need to install a driver and/or some firmware.
16.2 Recent Broadcom Chipset
The following chips are supported by the proprietary
broadcom-wl driver:
bcm4312, bcm4313, bcm4321, bcm4322, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm43227, bcm43228.
16.2.1 Install broadcom-wl with 1-Click
If you have one of those chips, you can install the broadcom-wl driver with 1-click install by clicking the button below and following instructions:
16.2.2 Manual Installation of broadcom-wl
If you prefer, install the packages manually instead:
1)
Find out which
kernel flavour you have (desktop, default, xen, pae), by running:
uname -r
2)
Add the
Packman Repository:
3)
Install the following packages with YaST or zypper:
- broadcom-wl
- broadcom-wl-kmp-[kernel flavour]
16.3 Older Broadcom Chipset
If you have an older Broadcom chip
supported by the, free, reverse-engineered b43 driver, i.e.:
bcm4303, bcm4306, bcm4309, bcm4311, bcm4318, you only need to install the firmware. This is automated by simply running this command and rebooting afterwards (you
must be online while running the command):
install_bcm43xx_firmware
16.4 Atheros Chipset
Atheros are working with the Linux-kernel developers towards providing support for all their wireless chipsets in the mainline Linux-kernel, via the
ath5k and
ath9k drivers, so most atheros cards should just work.
16.5 Intel Chipset
Intel are cooperating quite well with the Linux-kernel developers and all Intel wifi chips should just work.
16.6 Other Chipsets
If your chipset manufacturer is not mentioned above, search the web for
opensuse [your chipset] and you're likely to find information on how to get it working.
There's a software repository with drivers for e.g. Ralink and Realtek wireless chips. You can add it with this command:
zypper addrepo -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/driver:/wireless/openSUSE_12.1 wireless
For example if you have a Ralink RT3070 chipset and your kernel flavour is
desktop, install the package
rt3070sta-kmp-desktop.
Find out which
kernel flavour you have (desktop, default, xen, pae), by running:
uname -r
Send your comments via e-mail to admin [at] opensuse-guide.org