Is My Wifi Card Supported?

If you have a WIFI card that does not work right away after your SUSE Linux installation, your card is probably not supported. Don't feel bad - most wireless cards are not supported.

Why not? Novell has decided to include only drivers that are entirely open-sourced. Therefore, even drivers like MadWIFI are not included because they're not entirely open-sourced.

So, what do you do? You have three choices.

1) Purchase a card that has open-source drivers that are included with SUSE Linux. Buying a supported card is, by far, the easiest way to get wireless working in SUSE Linux. While almost all 802.11b cards are supported, only some 802.11g cards are available in the kernel. 802.11n cards are not in the kernel yet. Any 802.11b card that uses an Atmel, Prism2, or Orinoco chipset has open-source drivers that are included in the SUSE installation.

2) If your card has native Linux drivers available, install those. Atheros, RealTek 8180, Prism54, Intel Pro Wireless, and now some Broadcom chipsets have native Linux drivers, but they're not included with the SUSE installation. See the Native Driver Support listing to see if your card has native drivers available.

Some of these native drivers can be installed from RPMs on the addon CD. Other RPMs are available only on the internet. And some drivers require that they be compiled from source. You can get help with finding and installing these drivers at the List of WIFI Downloads and How-To's sticky.

3) If your card does not have native Linux drivers available, use ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper allows you to use your Windows XP drivers to run your WIFI card in Linux. It's not always the easiest to set up, but it has a fairly high success rate. See either my ndiswrapper setup guide or the SUSE Wiki ndiswrapper guides to set up ndiswrapper.


And of course, don't be afraid of starting a new thread if you need help.

A fourth option for those that have a supported built in or PCI NIC is to use a wireless access point that can be plugged straight into it - it literally turns the wired NIC into a wireless NIC. As cheap as a new card, too, and with less setup problems. No NDISWrapper, no drivers required.