A year ago we bought several HP Compaq's laptops. Different models, from 6715s, 6715b, 6710s, 6735 … (not all of them have gone through my hands so I don't know every one of them). They came with preinstalled Win XP Home, which worked fine (except that we deleted them and installed XP Pro cause we had that on older machines, and to get rid of all the promotional crap which came bundled with the OS).
Now, for some different reasons, some of the crew decides to put linux debian / opensuse up on them. And lucky me, since I'm working weekends, I'm the one who has to do it ;-(
Most of the things work fine except – on the first two models, I can't get wireless to work. They both, I think, have Broadcom BCM43XX internal cards, with which I have two problems:
– 1st – each of those laptops has a wireless turn on/off button, which upon startup doesn't go on, and therefore when opensuse boots, it's off – and cannot be turned on
– 2nd – I can't find the drivers for that card. I've even tried ndiswrapper, but haven't been able to get it to work
Has anyone managed to get the aforementioned working ?
Best Answer
The reason you're not seeing the light turn on is because the right driver isn't loading. The hardware expects a signal from the driver telling it to come out of sleep mode; it does this on Windows boots too, if you watch it.
You're looking for the b43 driver. Don't use the bcm43xx driver unless you absolutely have to because it's legacy now. The latest versions of the drivers are usually packaged up in new vanilla kernel releases, but you can get more information at:
http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
The wireless card link at the openSUSE WIKI looks a little old, but you could always ask at http://forums.opensuse.org or browse their Wireless Networking section. They've got quite a few openSUSE + Wireless experts over there.