Dealing with Broadcom Wireless and ATI Radeon Mobility HD Cards on OpenSUSE 11.3

And Linux has now officially taken over my new laptop :) I decided to try out installing the OpenSUSE-based KDE Four Live image (downloadable here), and it looks great so far! More importantly, I bought this laptop (HP G42 or something) well-knowing that it didn’t have Linux-friendly hardware. Well, it was relatively cheap and had great CPU and graphical specs (damn you Starcraft 2), plus the chaps manning the store were really nice.. Anyway, so I rolled my sleeves and set out to set myself up a Linux installation today expecting to spend some gruelling hours wrestling the inevitable issues – and was pleasantly surprised to have now apparently resolved everything quite cleanly and painlessly. Awesome :) And with that, I’m gonna pen me some trusty ol howto posts – the first ones in quite awhile I believe.

Happily, it turns out that there are working binary packages for the Broadcom and ATI card drivers, nicely packed in software repos. For Broadcom Wireless drivers, you can find them in the Packman repositories. Simply add the Packman repositories (if you have not already done so) in Yast using the following URL:

ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/packman/suse/11.3

Then search for and install the following two packages:

broadcom-wl
broadcom-wl-kmp-default

Or, if you prefer, use the following terminal commands:

su –
zypper ar -f ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/packman/suse/11.3 packman
zypper ref
zypper in broadcom-wl broadcom-wl-kmp-default

For reference, my model is:

Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

Source.

For ATI cards, I assume from the fact that you’re reading this that the default open source driver doesn’t work (if it does, they say it’s best to keep and use that). So you need the proprietary one, and the place to look is here. Following the instructions on that page, check whether your card is supported, and if so, pick one of the methods to install the driver. The one-click-install worked for me :)

Again for reference, my card model:

ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series]

There we have it. All it took was some Googling time (while squatting near the router so I could use a LAN cable), then adding two repositories, and installing a couple of packages, and it’s all set :) Fabulous, if I do say so meself.