I’m a newbie to Linux but I wanted to share some information I’ve discovered over the past few days.
I’ve been tying to install OpenSUSE 11.2 on my old Compaq EVO N400C laptop with a Linksys WPC54G v1.2 (BCM4306). I took a lot of scouring of the forums to figure out how to install the drivers and firmware correctly but the problem that I ran into was connecting into to the wifi. I was able to see the WAP but it would not accept the wep key I had. The oddest thing is that I was able to connect it one time after I installed the b43 firmware(?)to the AP and it ran all day fine. After I shut it down and brought it back up, it would never connect again. I would be able to see the AP that were close by and when I selected my AP, it would keep prompting me for the passkey. I know the key was good since it works on the Windows boxes. I finally found an article that mentions try running zypper -dup, which install some upgraded packages and now everything works correctly. The only annoying thing is that the password pops up asking for the password before the Network Manager will run.
Here are the steps I used (this is with a wired connection)
Download driver from Linksys, copy the driver/nt directory to the local disk
Update/install(?) ndiswrapper - Ndiswrapper - openSUSE
Install the b43 drivers - b43 - Linux Wireless (there’s a section for Suse in the article)
Finally run zypper -up and then zypper -dup - openSUSE 11 and bcm43xx-fwcutter/ndiswrapper? (this takes a while to run)
I hope this information is useful to someone else as well.