Tuesday, September 21, 2010

WLAN with Dell notebook and OpenSuse 11.x

Dell notebooks are normally equipped with Broadcom card for WLAN. All 802.11n Broadcom devices need to use the Broadcom STA driver. You need to accomplish the following steps to install such drivers:

1) Download current drivers from http://packman.links2linux.de/package/broadcom-wl. You need two drivers. In my case
broadcom-wl-5.60.48.36-7.pm.8.5.i586.rpm
broadcom-wl-kmp-default-5.60.48.36_k2.6.34.7_0.2-7.pm.8.5.i586.rpm

2) Open Linux terminal and go to the directory where you downloaded these drivers. Let run two commandos one after another
rpm -ivh broadcom-wl-kmp-default-5.60.48.36_k2.6.34.7_0.2-7.pm.8.5.i586.rpm
rpm -ivh broadcom-wl-5.60.48.36-7.pm.8.5.i586.rpm --force

3) Reboot your PC. If you still don't have a WLAN connection go to the YaST and configure WLAN in network devices. You should see at least your drivers.
Posted by Oleg Varaksin at 5:19 PM
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 30, 2011 at 1:41 PM

    Thanks for the valuable instructions!

    However I have one question:

    Before I install the STA driver, do I need to remove the existing b43 driver? (shown by 'lsmod')

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oleg VaraksinApril 30, 2011 at 9:46 PM

    b43 drivers will be normally blacklisted after installation (see /etc/modprobe.d/50-broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf). That means, they are not loaded at all. But sure, you can remove it too.

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