[byronsky]

hello,

installed suse 11 today and installed wireless driver for my card-bcm4311 broadcom card.

my wireless light is on but in the network icon in the task tray there are no wirless signals listed. tried to set them up manually but nothing.

iwconfig output:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:32 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

this is an unencrypted router im trying to connect to and i tested it with another computer. any ideas?

thx in advance

[deltaflyer]

you set it up in YaST ?

[byronsky]

i figured it out. it was the driver. i tried 3 or 4 different drivers that said they were for my card, and they would turn my wifi light on but didn't work. i eventually found one that did.

[waterhead]

I don't know what you mean by "I installed the driver...". The driver for your card is already part of the kernel. You do need to install the firmware for it to work properly, though.

If it is NDISwrapper that you installed, then you need to disable the kernel driver for NDISwrapper to work properly. They both cannot be loaded at the same time.

[byronsky]

if the driver is part of the kernel then why do i need ndiswrapper at all. the whole point is to use ndiswrapper to "wrap" the scripts from windows drivers for my wireless card. that is the point of Ndiswrapper. i couldn't find the correct driver because ndiswrapper only accepts the drivers from win xp. on searching for the driver for my card from the hp site (hp is the brand of my laptop) i have found that xp drivers are not supplied. this is common these days in the windows world. windows customer are forced into vista as are most people when they buy a new laptop. all the more reason to switch to linux or mac. that was the problem. i had to find xp drivers that were compatible with my card. and although i found many. not all of them work for every application. it sucks, but that's the way it is. hopefully broadcom will accept the fact that linux is an alternative and start to release drivers to the open source world.

bcmwl5.inf is only in XP
bcmwl6.inf is Vista

What i meant by " i installed drivers is:.....ndiswrapper -i <driver>
I assumed the <-i> stood for install
whatever the driver may be.
I appologize if my terminology is off. im fairly new to linux.

[waterhead]

NDISwrapper came about because of the lack Linux drivers for wireless. Since then many wireless drivers are now available in Linux. The Broadcom driver is called b43, and works quite well.

b43 - Linux Wireless

If you want to use NDISwrapper, that is OK. But you must remove the b43 driver and prevent it from automatically loading. Enter this as root:

modprobe -r b43

Now you need to edit a file and add b43 to it. Open the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist in a text editor, as root. Add this to the bottom of the list:

blacklist b43

[byronsky]

The b43xx driver is crap. it's never worked for any card ive tried to use it for. for that reason i always blacklist it. that is what i was gettiing at. it took awhile to find the right driver. ndiswrapper has been my only option, and for that to work, i need the proper windows driver

sad..........but ....true

[waterhead]

Yes, the bcm43xx driver wasn't very good. But it has been superceded by the b43 driver. I am using the b43 driver to connect to this forum, and it works great!

Use what you want, as long as you get a working wireless card.