This morning I ran an update to my syatem, using ‘zypper update.’ As far as I can tell there was no kernel upgrade (though there was one of those earlier this week, and everything seemed to be aorking fine after that.) Now I boot my system back up, and wireless is gone. I can power it off and on using the hardware switch, and I can see it with lspci, but the kernel module seems to be awol. I have a Lenovo s10e with the Broadcom BCM4312 wireless, and use the broadcom-wl driver.
Here is what I get with lspci:
sabre:/lib/modules # lspci | grep -i broad
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)
I have tried reinstalling the broadcom-wl packages with yast; it seems to be installed and I get no errors. But when I try
sabre:/lib/modules # modprobe wl
FATAL: Module wl not found.
And when I look for the kernel module wl.ko in the directory /lib/modules/2.6.27.21-0.1-default/kernel/net/wireless, it is missing. I have tried the default and the debug kernel with the same results, while the older kernels seem to have been removed in the kernel update.
You can roll back the kernel in Software Management
filter by repo and select Update
then select the versions tab in the lower right of the UI. You can then select a kernel back and accept.
If the recent kernel update broke your wireless, have you tried compiling against the new kernel (sometimes wireless and audio package are a little behind the kernel itself) so it’s good policy to wait a week or so before updating the kernel.
Thank you very much! Your advice was right on the money and in perfect time.
I have rolled back to the 2.6.27-19.3.2 kernel, and the wireless is working again. I am going on a trip for three weeks with this computer - I’ll avoid updating again until I get back, and hopefully the wireless will have caught up by then.
I haven’t had to compile broadcom-wl on this machine in the past - haven’t got the source. Perhaps I should download it and keep it on hand, in case this happens on the road someday.
Thanks very much for your help!
