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Updated: 8 June, 2023

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 Linux kernel comes with the brcm80211 driver by default. This driver supports bcm4313, bcm43224, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm4329, bcm4330, bcm4334, bcm43241, bcm43235 (>= rev 3), bcm43236 (>= rev 3), bcm43238 (>= rev 3), bcm43143, bcm43242.

If you experience problems with the above driver, and you have one of the following chipsets: bcm4312, bcm4313, bcm4321, bcm4322, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm43227, bcm43228, you may want to try installing the proprietary broadcom-wl driver (package: broadcom-wl) available in the Packman software repository.

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 (make sure the package b43-fwcutter is installed and that you are 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.