Getting Belkin F5D-7000 PCI card to work in OpenSUSE 11.4...need help!

English Network/Internet
1

Hi guys,

Just created an account here to get hopefully get some assistance from you Linux experts :slight_smile:

OK I have spent the entire afternoon trying to get my Belkin F5D-7000 PCI WLAN card to work in my HP dc5100SFF PC now running OpenSUSE 11.4, and I have been partially successful, but have gotten stuck.

I read up on NDISwrapper and have got that successfully installed by following the instructions here: Ndiswrapper - openSUSE, and I have installed the driver for the wireless card successfully (as far as I can tell). The orange light on the card is now ‘on’ which would signify the fact it has been recognised by the OS, and I can see all the wireless networks in the area by using the

iwlist wlan0 scan

command in Terminal. But that’s where the success dried up. There doesn’t seem to be a Networking icon on the panel at the bottom of the screen, and there is not green flashing ‘activity’ light on the wireless card. I tried connecting to my home network by following the instructions found here: Connect to a wireless network via command line , using the command:

iwconfig wlan0 essid NETWORK_ID key s:WIRELESS_KEY

(obviously replacing NETWORD_ID and KEY with my own security details

and then

dhclient wlan0

and neither commands threw back any errors, but I still have no Networking icon on the panel and the status of ‘Network’ displayed on the Start menu (apologies for the Windows terminology there) is ‘None’.

I feel I’m very close to an answer but am obviously missing something, probably something simple, but I’m afraid I’ve already exhausted my very limited Linux knowledge. Any information or help would be immensely appreciated :slight_smile:

2

Seems like there may be at least five different revisions for that wifi card. You can check out the lists for Belkin here:

Linux wireless LAN support http://linux-wless.passys.nl

It seems you must download some software from Belkin, but you also need to determine the version of the card. Running the following terminal command might give you the version:

sudo /sbin/lspci

I have a bash script file called netinfo you can download from here in message #11 that can provide a lot more info for you to look at:

netinfo - Read Network & PC Information into a Local Text File

Thank You,

3

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

OK so running that code I found out the PCI card has the Broadcom BCM4306 rev3 chipset. Looking on the table in the link you posted takes me here: b43 - Linux Wireless

and it looks like OpenSUSE has the utitlity included to download and install the required firmware. But I’ll have to take the PC downstairs to plug it in via Ethernet in order to run it. I’ll let you know the outcome tomorrow :slight_smile: Thank you

4

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

OK so running that code I found out the PCI card has the Broadcom BCM4306 rev3 chipset. Looking on the table in the link you posted takes me here: b43 - Linux Wireless

and it looks like OpenSUSE has the utitlity included to download and install the required firmware. But I’ll have to take the PC downstairs to plug it in via Ethernet in order to run it. I’ll let you know the outcome tomorrow :slight_smile: Thank you
Yes, you most often will need to use a wired connection to download and install the proper drivers for your wireless hardware. This is true unless the driver is included in the Linux Kernel or an open source driver exists or some one has revered engineered the hardware. Even on my workstation, I had to download a firmware file not included with openSUSE as standard and which did not come with the default openSUSE installation. And so this seems to be a common occurrence and a reason to need a way to run your computer network wired long enough to get the right wifi drivers. Good luck and let us know if you need any other help.

Thank You,

5

hey there,

OK some progress!

I successfully downloaded and installed the ‘bcm43xx’ firmware following the instructions here: b43 - Linux Wireless

It then occured to me that I didn’t actually need to be using NDISwrapper since the card was natively supported by Linux (I’m assuming here, based on the above website which doesn’t mention NDISwrapper at all) but that during the NDISwrapper setup I had blacklisted ‘ssb’ since I wanted NDISwrapper to control the driver. So backtracking, I un-blacklisted ssb. It also occured to me that the reason I didn’t have a networking icon on the panel was because I had been using the ‘Traditional ifup method’ to configure it, so I switched it to NetworkManager.

After I enabled NetworkManager, left-clicking on the newly-appeared icon on the panel shows ‘Wired network: disconnected’ (I pulled out the ethernet cable), ‘Wireless network: disconnected’, but it displays my LAN’s name under the ‘Available’ networks with full signal. I click on it and it brings up the ‘Authentication required’ window. I select the correct security method and put in the password and hit Connect. But then it displays the swirly ‘connecting…’ icon indefinitely on the panel without actually connecting. After a while it brings the ‘Authentication required’ window back up, as if I put in a wrong password.

So I’m a bit stuck again. If you have any idea why it won’t let me connect when I’m so close, I’d love you forever!

Thank you :slight_smile:

6

Problem solved :slight_smile:

I simply restarted my router and restarted the computer and it automatically connected me on startup!

Very happy indeed. Thanks so much for your help. :smiley:

7

Problem solved :slight_smile:

I simply restarted my router and restarted the computer and it automatically connected me on startup!

Very happy indeed. Thanks so much for your help. :smiley:
So happy to help. Could you outline the steps required to get this wifi hardware working, including what worked and what was not required. Remember many people search through these messages looking for their own solution and a success story is something they want to read about.

Thank You,