Wireless connection behaving erratically with Broadcom cards

English Network/Internet
1

Hi,

I installed OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 KDE on two laptops, a Dell Latitude 6230 and an Apple MacBook Pro. Both have Broadcom wireless cards, and both show erratic behavior. Let’s say that WiFi works in the sense that chickens fly and horses swim. SSIDs may appear and disappear again, KDE’s NetworkManager applet asks repeatedly for wireless passwords even after typing in the right one.

On both machines I’ve simply installed the broadcom-wl driver from Packman, but I guess there’s something wrong with it.

Any suggestions?

2

I’ll answer that myself, since I just found the solution. I simply removed the broadcom-wl driver and installed the firmware instead.

# install_bcm43xx_firmware

Works perfectly now.

Curiously enough, online documentation recommends the broadcom-wl driver for both chipsets.

Cheers.

3

As fas a openSUSE is concerned, the Broadcom-WL package is “community only”, meaning “private builds by openSUSE users”. The packages available there should, only be used after direct consultation with whoever it was who built the package …

The openSUSE Wiki SDB “Wireless network card” «out of date – needs to be updated … » mentions some Broadcom issues which are partially current but not really: <https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Wireless_network_card&gt;.

  1. It, correctly, mentions that, a BCM43xx driver has been available in the Linux Kernel since Kernel version 2.6.17.
  2. It is a little bit out of date with respect to the firmware – installation of the (official) “bcm43xx-firmware” package should perform all the necessary actions required to have the firmware loaded at boot time.

[HR][/HR]

  • Make sure that, you remove the “broadcom-wl” package.
  • Walk through the kernel’s modprobe blacklist – ‘/etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf’ – and check that nothing has been added by the “broadcom-wl” package.
  • You may have to “rmmod wl” to get rid of the Broadcom WL module …
  • Further information is available via ArchLinux here: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless&gt;.
4

When I purchased my laptop, way back when, WiFi did not work. So I installed broadcom-wl, which got it working. That was for openSUSE 11.3, as I recall.

When I later installed openSUSE 11.4, the WiFi worked with the live CD but not with the install from the DVD installer. So I just copied over the firmware and it then worked.

All versions since then have worked out-of-the-box with no additional firmware and no broadcom-wl driver. Some people suggested that it would have worked better with broadcom-wl – and maybe that’s right. But I prefer to go with the standard open source software wherever possible.