Broadcom BCM4312 for Lenovo S12 in openSUSE 11.4

Broadcom is the finicky mistress of Linux. Sometimes she’ll greet you with a smile with little effort and work perfectly, and sometimes she’ll spurn your most tried and trusted approaches.

Users with 4313, 43224, and 43225 will be happy to note the inclusion of open Broadom wireless drivers with the 2.6.36 kernel; however, for those of us who have to woo our Broadcom wireless, there’s a little bit extra work that needs to happen.

This is one of those unfortunate cases where you have to be online to get online.

First, find out what flavor of the kernel you’re running by opening a terminal and and running the command:

uname -r

Add the Essential Packman repository (if not already added):

sudo zypper ar -n packman-essentials http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_11.4/Essentials packman-essentials

Then, install broadcom-wl, broadcom-wl-kmp-(uname -r), and rfkill*

Next, sudo into your favorite text editor. Kwrite is used in this example, but gedit, mousepad, or any text editor will do:

sudo kwrite /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf

and add the following lines at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf:

blacklist ssb

blacklist b43

blacklist acer-wmi

*Note: while not essential, I’ve found that including these allows automatic connection after boot and hibernation/standby on the S12–especially the acer-wmi kernel module.

You should be able to configure your wireless in YaST and connect after a reboot.

Netflix for Android Leaked

A little late, but interesting nonetheless:

Following the “Good News, Bad News” of Netflix’s mixed support of Android, a development APK has been leaked online. While the Netflix APK seems to install properly, few (if any) have reported any success in actually streaming video.

This is a promising sign of Netflix finally coming to Linux.

MintMenu on openSUSE

While being mainly a fan of openSUSE, I’ve come to appreciate Linux Mint on my netbook. One of the shining gems of Mint being it’s well integrated mintMenu. Many thanks go to Unamanic (follow his blog here), who has been gracious enough to provide mintMenu for openSUSE on the build service.

After a quick log out and back in, you can add mintMenu by right-clicking on your panel and selecting “add to panel.” Scroll down or search for mintMenu. Now you can remove your standard slab menu with the minty-fresh version.

 

MintMenu 1-click install for openSUSE 11.4

openSUSE 11.4 Suggested Reading

openSUSE 11.4 was released March 10th, and I’ve already happily updated to the geeko’s latest release. There’s a lot to be excited about in this excellent release. Among the top features are Kde 4.6, Gnome 2.32, Gnome 3 preview, Xfce 4.8, LXDE, LibreOffice 3.3.1, and Firefox 4 beta 12. Also included are improvements to package management, and the 200-line usability patch included in version 2.6.36 of the kernel. The full product highlights are available on the wiki here.

Read Oldcpu’s excellent guide here, which includes information for new and  seasoned users alike. At the very least, it’s a good idea to review the most annoying bugs for 11.4 before installing/upgrading. Existing users should also beware of a nasty bug when using zypper to “dup” to 11.4.

Many thanks to Eye On Linux for an excellent review of openSUSE 11.4.

I’ll have some tips and tricks coming up soon, so be sure to check back.

Update to openSUSE 11.1

Now that openSUSE 11.1 has been out for a couple weeks, it’s about time I share with the readers how to get around some of the growing pains of this latest release. It also seems an opportune time to update some of the guides and general information on this blog.

One of the main issues seems to stem from user permissions, particularly with KDE3 applications. So let’s fire up YaST2 and go to Security and Users–User and Group Management. Now click the edit button and add yourself to the following groups: audio, cdrom, and disk. You’ll need to log out and back in for the changes to take effect. There’s been some reports that Packman’s version of K3B doesn’t contain this bug, but these changes seem to help the rest of the KDE3 applications to automount properly.

Quite to my surprise when I went to add repositories, I found that my update repository’s autorefresh option was disabled, so check your repositories in YaST2 under Software–Software Repositories. I also disabled the Source and Debug repos.

The gstreamer backend for phonon has proven quite buggy on my system, so I removed it and instead installed phonon-backend-xine. I’d also recommend installing kdebase3 and kdebase3-SuSE to hedge up a few of the final quirks between KDE4 and KDE3 applications.

Install video drivers.

“Compiz on 11.1 hates me” as so aptly titled on openSUE’S troubleshooting guide for Compiz (Compiz certainly hated me). The solution is quite simple, however. First, remove all packages for Compiz and Emerald.Then remove all configuration files. The easiest way is to start up your favorite terminal emulator (like Konsole or Yakuake) and run the command:

rm -rf ~/.config/compiz

Reinstall Compiz via 1-click install: