Install broadcom wireless drivers in Open Suse

Most of the new laptop hardware are supported by opensuse, thanks to increasing collaboration between developers. However, some of the older machines, particularly those having older broadcom chipset struggle to get there wireless device working under linux.

This post contains basic instructions about how to Install broadcom wireless drivers in Open Suse 13.2, but should work on most of the versions of opensuse.

First of all we need to check our wireless chipset,this can be done by typing following command in terminal

hwinfo --wlan --short

this will give the details of your wireless card

Now that we have information regarding our hardware, its only a matter of installing required firmware or driver.

New Broadcom Chips

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

If you have one of bcm4312, bcm4313, bcm4321, bcm4322, bcm43224, bcm43225, bcm43227, bcm43228 and your wireless lan is not working , try installing proprietary broadcom driver from the packman repository.

Old Broadcom Chips

If you have one of the bcm4303, bcm4306, bcm4309, bcm4311, bcm4318  chipsets, you can get them working by installing firmware. This can be done by following command

install_bcm43xx_firmware

Make sure you are connected to internet while typing this command. b43-fwcutter  is installed in your system.