On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Greg Freemyer wrote:

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 7:57 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

...

 while this is technically a question regarding SLES 11, i want to clarify how the solution differs from what i've found for opensuse 11.

 i want to get wireless working on my laptop running SLES 11, which has a broadcom BCM4318 chip (and NetworkManager installed).  i've googled extensively and what i've noticed is that opensuse seems to have a simple solution -- running the command "/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware", which appears to come as part of the "bcm43xx-fwcutter" package.

 i was hoping it would be that simple for SLES 11, but all my searching hasn't turned up anything similar.  am i just missing the obvious?  is there nothing equivalently straightforward for SLES 11?

rday

p.s.  there's a long, detailed explanation of installing the b43 driver in various distros here:

 http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

so i guess i could always do it slowly and painfully, but i'm hoping for something simpler.  thanks.

Robert,

Did you come across the HCL for wireless in your searches:

http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_%28Wireless%29

Which will lead you to:

http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_%28Wireless%29/Broadcom_BCM43xx

It shows the 3 ways opensuse supports broadcom chipsets. Pick only one.

I don't know how it applies to SLES, but it is probably at least a good starting point.

curiously, i didn't run across exactly those pages in my wanderings, but it still seems that the explanation for opensuse is not easily extended for SLES 11. those packman firmware packages do look like they will unload numerous .fw files under /lib/firmware/b43, which looks good -- that provides the firmware files. but there is still a reference to the package b43-fwcutter, which (allegedly) supplies the utility /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware, and eventually the b43 loadable module. and i just don't see where to get that package for SLES 11. i didn't think it was going to be this difficult. that's why i'm thinking i'm really going to have to do this manually based on this: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 with downloading tarballs and so on. rday

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Peter Van Lone wrote:

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote: <snip>

...

 those packman firmware packages do look like they will unload numerous .fw files under /lib/firmware/b43, which looks good -- that provides the firmware files.  but there is still a reference to the package b43-fwcutter, which (allegedly) supplies the utility /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware, and eventually the b43 loadable module.  and i just don't see where to get that package for SLES 11.

SLE 11 is based on OpenSuse 11.1 -- for the most part any repo or software you can use with openSUSE 11.1 you can use with SLE ...

i had assumed as much, so i guess one approach is to simply pull out my opensuse 11.1 x86_64 DVD, add it as a repository and install off of that. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry. Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ========================================================================