<soapbox> Until recently I have shied away from replacing my rock solid 9.3 system with anything newfangled, but since support is probably going to stop in the foreseeable future I decided to do a parallell installation of 10.2, just to see if I would run into any trouble. The 10.2 distro I got from a DVD that was part of a "Linux special" of C'T (a German computer magazine, also appearing in a Dutch version in the Netherlands). Everything went smoothly, but for a major glitch in the configuration of the wifi card, that crippled the remainder of the installation (installing update repositories etc), in short, everything that requires an internet connection. I am the proud owner of a Belkin wifi card, that I use in 9.3 with ndiswrapper. It was duly identified in 10.2 and provided with the bcm43xx driver which made good sense to me, since the card has a Broadcom chip. But. 1. It said I had to download firmware before the installation could complete. That was kind of hard, since I had no internet connection. 2. Yast configured it as eth1, which struck me as strange (I'd expect wlan0) 3. Yast did not hand me an opportunity to enter ESSID and encryption key, with the result, that the wireless router was unreachable. After the installation (semi-)completed I ran ifconfig but the card was not listed. I entered essid and encryption key by hand using iwconfig and restarted the network, but still no joy. I rebooted 9.3 to look around at the Belkin site for firmware and found none. I googled for "suse 10.2 bcm43xx firmware" and found the (surprise!) opensuse site, that told a totally different story, viz, that I had to install "bcm43xx-fwcutter" from the "installation disc" and run "install_bcm43xx_firmware". That looked promising. The software appears to be, apparently for legal reasons, on the "add-on CD", which btw was part of the DVD the distro was on. Apparently the same legal reasons did not forbid that. :-) What boggles my mind, is that Yast says I have to download the stuff where it is on the DVD. (Probably should have checked the box Add from other sources, or some such description only understandable by someone who gets there for the umpteenth time) And that it cannot install it itself. I mean if the stuff is there, what the heck. Ask the user, or do something intelligent. Well, anyway, after I handcrafted the eth1 configuration file to include a couple of "WIRELESS" parameters like WIRELESS, WIRELESS_ESSID and WIRELESS_KEY and installed the online update directories I had basically a running system. I hate to think what would have happened, had I been a newbie trying linux for the first time. The problem is well known btw, as the 18700 google hits on "suse 10.2 bcm43xx firmware" testify. Among those a substantial amount consists of newbies being left stranded in the desert. The card does not run under knetworkmanager, but what else is new? </soapbox> Regards, -- Jos van Kan registered Linux user #152704 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org