Dell wireless 1540 802.11 a/g/n card - no drivers available?

Hi there,

I’m new to opensuse and when I installed opensuse 13.1 on my Dell precision laptop, everything seemed to be fine except the wireless driver. There seems to be no wireless driver for my card, which is a Dell wireless 1540 half-mini card. It appears to use a broadcom driver in Windows.

I have found this driver:
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Dell_Wireless_1540_Wireless-N_WLAN_Mini-Card

It does not appear to install correctly, when I run make it cannot find a file. I had to install make using a TP-link wireless adapter. If there is anything else I need to also install to install the driver correctly, please let me know.

The broadcom-wl driver is available as RPMs from Packman. You don’t have to compile it yourself.

Just add the Packman repo (you would need it for most multimedia stuff anyway) in YaST->Software Repositories->Add->Community Repositories.
The go into YaST->Software Management and install those two packages: broadcom-wl and broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop. The latter one depends on what kernel flavour you are using. -desktop should be the default in most cases, but it could also be kernel-default fe. Use “uname -a” to check, or just have a look in YaST which kernel- package you have installed.

If you have no possibility to connect to the Internet in the openSUSE system, you can also download the packages manually here:
http://packman.links2linux.de/package/broadcom-wl

After a reboot, the wireless should work then.