So after an update nuked xorg in my previous Gentoo install I decided to use OpenSuSe. I already know from setting up Gentoo that I have the misfortune of having a wireless card that isn’t supported by the b43 or bcma drivers, which means I have to use broadcom-wl. In Gentoo it was just a matter of removing bcma and b43 support from my kernel to get it to install, and then work, but here it installs just fine but doesn’t work. Running ifconfig -a should show wlo1 however all it shows is eno1 and lo. My specific card is the bcm43142. I am using the Tumbleweed branch. Here is what rpm -qa | egrep “kernel|broadcom” reports
3.112554] usb 1-1.7: Product: BCM43142A0
12.444292] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM43142A0-0a5c-216c.hcd failed with error -2
12.444300] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: patch brcm/BCM43142A0-0a5c-216c.hcd not found
I plan on later recompiling my kernel to remove support for hardware I don’t have, so will removing the other drivers fix this issue or do you think it’s unrelated. I don’t need wireless support for the next month or so, but will need it by mid January. Any suggestions?
It’s unnecessary to remove the b43 and/or bcma drivers from the kernel, and it won’t help you in the slightest. The package broadcom-wl contains a blacklist for those drivers so that they won’t get loaded on boot.
Your problem is that the broadcom-kmp-desktop (Kernel Module Package) package you have installed (for kernel 3.17.4) doesn’t match the kernel you use (3.18.1).
Tumbleweed updated to Kernel 3.18 recently, but the broadcom-wl driver fails to build at the moment (it already had to be patched to build successfully with the latest kernels for quite some time, the current version supports 3.11 only since about a month, before that it even had to be patched to work with the 3.11 kernel included in openSUSE 13.1, which has been released over a year ago).
You’ll have to wait until this is fixed, I’m afraid.
I cannot tell you how long this will take though.
You may yourself call lucky that wolfi323 kmows a lot about Tumbleweed and also watches this forum.
But Next time it would realy be better to post in theTumbleweed, Evergreen and PreRelease/Beta, forum. It was not created for nothing and it is the usual place for Tumbleweed problems and Tumbleweed users (including wolfi323).
Oh, I thought it made sense to post here, as it was a wireless issue. If I were to downgrade my kernel version to match the driver then I’m assuming that should fix it. In Gentoo you’d just tell portage to install the sources for the version you wanted, how do you change kernel releases in OpenSuSe? Do I need to download them or can it be installed through zypper?
Hate to double post, though I’ll probably forget to edit it in 10 minutes so sorry in advance. I saw that there are entries in grub for 3.17.4 so I’ll just set it as default until broadcom-wl gets updated. Thanks for the help wolfi323, and I’ll try to think a little more on where the threads get posted (though in my defense this thread probably would have been directed here if I posted it in the Tumbleweed forums, so you know).
When that is the logic, then having a separate Tumbleweed forums would be useless because beside Wireless, all subject are covered by the non Tumbleweed sections.
The idea is that you should decide that getting help in your Tumbleweed environment is best served by going to fellow Tumbleweed users. Most users of the standard openSUSE versions wouldn’t even dare to comment in Tumbleweed cases
Ah Okay, well fair enough lol. Well while I’m here I’m having a “new” issue. I had the same issue in Gentoo, though not quite as bad. For what ever reason I can’t keep a good connection despite what connection tools I use. NetworkManager has been the most consistent, though not great. I keep getting “authorization supplicant timed out” errors and then need to completely stop my wireless then reconnect. As I had this issue in Gentoo, I think it is related to my card rather than the distro. If it didn’t require so much effort to get the wireless up I’d test in other distros to confirm, but I’m pretty sure it is a card (or networkmanager itself). Any ideas?
Not really, sorry.
You could try to configure the connection as “system connection” (“Allow other users to connect” or similar), this apparently helps sometimes with connection issues.
But this sounds either like a hardware issue or a problem with the wl driver (which is proprietary closed-source).
Btw, I noticed that Gentoo do have a patch for kernel 3.18 already. I’m going to write an email to the Packman mailinglist and tell them about it…
Well it looks like issues have gone down a little. The issues started up when I masked ModemManager from systemd, and persisted even after manually starting it. I can’t imagine they’re related (I though modemmanager had something to do with using a cellphone’s connection for wifi) but rebooting with it unmasked fixed the issue. On a side note, since the original issue was solved, how do I mark it as such? Every forum is different in that regard, the one I spend the most time in, you just edit the original post and change the title, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Well, it’s been a while, but the broadcom-wl packages in Packman have finally been updated with patches for kernel 3.19 a few days ago and should hopefully work now with the standard kernel in Tumbleweed, i.e. 3.19.3 at the moment.
