So I’ve been swapping between some different distribution but no one has really satisfied this picky ol’ computer until I tried openSUSE, however I have the troublesome **BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] ** chip. The first time I booted it was running kernel driver b43-pci-bridge driver, which I figured out after reading some guides that I needed to replace with broadcom-wl and broadcom-kmp-default. So I did and now my output says this:
**Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. T77H106.00 Wireless Half-size Mini PCIe Card [105b:e01b]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: wl[/size]
iwconfig doesn’t list wlan and wifi isn’t lit on my computer. I seem to be unable to scan for connections and Connection State says “Unavailable”.
I’m a total noob but this is a really nice looking OS and I would really like it to work.
You see, the wifi didn’t work at first. So I read about the broadcom driver at HCL:Network (Wireless) - openSUSE, and decided to try it.
This is the resulting output: 0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
1: acer-bluetooth: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
2: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
What amazes me is that I haven’t done ANYTHING besides installing rfkill. And now, for the 3rd reboot in a row I was surprised to see that my WiFi switch and it’s indicator was shining. Now I’m able to see all of the wireless connections.
It started to work automatically, so I guess that it anytime soon will also suddenly stop functioning. So I will keep this forum thread bookmarked for now.
Thanks guys, I love this distribution! I’m not overly experienced as a UNIX/Linux user, but if it runs as smoothly as now I will never go back to Windows (sorry for mentioning the devil, brother!).