Updated: 15 April, 2012

by FreeFind

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.


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.

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.

The following chips are supported by the proprietary broadcom-wl driver: bcm4312, bcm4313, bcm4321, bcm4322, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm43227, bcm43228.

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:


If you prefer, install the packages manually instead:

1)
Find out which kernel flavour you have (desktop, default, xen, pae), by running:
2)
Add the Packman Repository:


3)
Install the following packages with YaST or zypper:

• broadcom-wl
• broadcom-wl-kmp-[kernel flavour]

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):
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.

Intel are cooperating quite well with the Linux-kernel developers and all Intel wifi chips should just work.

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:
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: