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.

WTF.

Seriously, WTF?

I decided to try using ndiswrapper to get my wireless working on my openSUSE 10.2 machine. Pain in the ...

It works, but for some god-forsaken reason it thinks the wireless card is an ethernet card and shows it as eth1 vs. wlan0.

To install the driver and use ndiswrapper I followed this gents page. Very nice page, excellent info, but it doesn't say one thing about having to reboot your computer to have it recognize your wireless card (which of course is true in my case). You should be able to just modprobe ndiswrapper as far as I understand. WTF. Then I followed some other helpful fellow's instructions on using bcm43xx-fwcutter in order to get my Broadcom wireless card to show up as wlan0 -- no dice. I even blacklisted bcm43xx in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (I think that's it) as another gent had mentioned still to no avail!

OpenSUSE vs. Broadcom -- Broadcom wins. OpenSUSE got in some excellent blows by being able to actually connect to the net, but Broadcom dominated the battle by never submitting to wlan0. Hope you didn't have money riding on that fight.

Whatever...

I'm so tired of screwing with it that as long as I have wireless I don't care. As far as I'm concerned I win.

The transitive property: a=b=c so a=c. My version:

Linux working = Not using MS Windows which = MS doesn't get my Money
so...
Linux working = No money for MS

Hooray for Linux. Job well done.