Wireless on OpenSuSE 10.2 with Broadcom

Once again fighting the good fight and trying to get this chipset to work properly with OpenSuSE 10.2.

As always thanks to this skittle loving guy's website: http://nextgen.no-ip.org/~andrew/linux/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapperinfo-gui.php for not only explaining the process but having an explanation that was even specific to OpenSuSE 10.x (and in my case 10.2).

In addition to his instructions I would add not to use ndisgtk, just run the commands manually (as superuser of course):
'ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf'
'modprobe ndiswrapper'
And furthermore I took these steps to not only ensure a working card, but also have it accurately show link/signal quality and load at boot:
edit /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper and add change 'wlan0' to 'eth1'
and
edit /etc/init.d/network adding 'modprobe ndiswrapper' somewhere in the beginning

**Added 14Aug07*** Make sure to configure the wireless device in YaST. Do not use the pre-configured card, make a new wireless device.

I will also mention that when I list installed ndiswrapped windows drivers I do get this annoying output: ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5a : driver installed
device (14E4:4318) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)

However as far I as can tell it seems to make no difference what-so-ever. In addition, I tried to correct this output by blacklisting 'bcm43xx' to which my computer said it was then 'ignoring blacklist rule bcm43xx' or something that effect. So whatever.

Do I absolutely now how what I did affected my computer? Absolutely not. Does my wireless start at boot and work with accurate link/signal quality? Yes.

FUSE/NTFS-3G

Alright. Very annoying thing about linux: will not just mount a USB Hard Drive (Large External Drive) with read/write permissions. That is because the volume is most likely NTFS and you need NTFS-3g and FUSE in order to have read/write permissions on and NTFS drive in linux (or at least OpenSuSE 10.2). Here's a good link to help with that whole process:

http://forum.ntfs-3g.org/viewtopic.php?t=21

Other Helpful Sites:

Just random links for initial setup of this OS. ***DO NOT UPDATE ALL PACKAGES***. Learned that one the hard way, but just for future reference there is the link anyways.

Updating All OpenSuSE 10.2 packages: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16592.html

Setting up OpenSuSE 10.2 Initially: http://www.suseblog.com/?p=171

WRT54G V5

I have the above named router. It sucks. Everyone was like "this is an awesome router!" - yeah if you have versions 1-4. Fortunately I did find Linux based firmware that can be installed in it's puny 2MB of memory (vs. the 4MB in the previous versions). Unfortunately I can't use it as a wireless repeater because the micro version of the Linux firmware doesn't include that capability. Still good stuff - I highly recommend it over the stock firmware.

DD-WRT Micro

Much thanks to this guy's page for an awesome walk-through of the process...

Well until next time...