Some help needed in patching the Broadcom hybrid driver

English Network/Internet
#1

Im making plans to buy a 15" Dell Inspiron notebook as it’s currently the cheapest 15" notebook which is available in my country, and from what I have read, the Dell WiFi card used in the notebook is Broadcom based, and that Broadcom had recently released hybrid drivers for their cards.

Now, after browsing through OpenSUSE’s HCL [/URL, it seems that a patch to the drivers is needed.

My question is, how do you patch the driver? Do you just go to <extracted driver directory>/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c and just throw in this whole chunk of text anyway into the file, or is there something more to it?

@@ -580,6 +580,7 @@
 	range->enc_capa |= IW_ENC_CAPA_CIPHER_TKIP;
 	range->enc_capa |= IW_ENC_CAPA_CIPHER_CCMP;
 	range->enc_capa |= IW_ENC_CAPA_WPA2;
+	range->scan_capa = IW_SCAN_CAPA_ESSID;
 #endif 
 
 	return 0;

Please advice, thanks.](“http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_(Wireless)/Broadcom_BCM43xx#The_hard_way”)

#2

Currently you have two options. The one I currently use is the broadcom-wl driver from Packman.
b43 support will be working with 11.3’s kernel
You can currently use an updated kernel in 11.2 to get that support, I tried it and it works.

#3

Well, i’m on OpenSuSe 11.1 as my connection is slow, so downloading another DVD release is not exactly a solution.

And since Broadcom has already released a driver which will work for most of the newer cards used by Dell and other manufacturers, i figured I want to give it a try.

I don’t doubt it won’t be easy, but I believe in learning by experimenting, and my problem is that the HCL tells people to apply a patch but doesn’t go into any instructions on how to go about doing it, as shown in the link above.

So, my question is, how do we run the patch as posted in the HCL? Do we just copy paste the chunk of text into the wl_iw.c, or is it not as simple as that?

#4

What device exactly does this dell have?

#5

According to the Dell website, it’s a Dell 1397 card, and im not exactly sure what particular Broadcom chipset it uses, except that a Dell official wrote on his blog that it was supported by Broadcom’s proprietary hybrid driver.

But the card is not so much of the issue as the HCL states that the patch listed is only meant to enable the driver to connect to hidden SSIDs, which is the case for my home and my workplace.

And im affraid i cannot change my mind about buying the laptop, because it’s the cheapest available 15" in my country, and earning less than $800 a month means that I can only think in terms of wallet size.

#6

HCL/Laptops/Dell - openSUSE
Any of those?

#7

You don’t, somebody else at Packman already did it for you.