Setting up wireless with ndiswrapper

To enable wireless on the Dell Inspiron 1501 and other laptops using Broadcom drivers ndiswapper is needed to use the Windows drivers for the card as no documentation for the card is provided stopping people from writing open drivers. There is an open source Linux driver which loads proprietary firmware but this is much less efficent than the ndiswrapper method so I do not recommend this method. This tutorial will work for both 64bit openSUSE and 32bit.

In order to install ndiswrapper you first need a root terminal, you can get this by opening a terminal and typing in su. You will need an Internet connection for this tutorial so try connecting to your router via an Ethernet cable.

Then to download and install the packages type this in:

zypper in ndiswrapper ndiswrapper-kmp-default

You then need to download the the Windows driver the unzip it (this should take about 3 minutes).

cd /tmp
wget ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXE

unzip R151517.EXE

Now move the drivers into a hidden folder in you home directory:

mv DRIVER ~/.drivers
cd ~/drivers

You can now install the drivers with ndiswrapper:

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -ma
ndiswrapper -mi

Now blacklist the broken drivers installed by default:

echo blacklist ssb >> /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
echo blacklist b43 >> /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper

Once you reboot you will be able to connect to your wireless network. If this does not work please comment and I will try to help figure it out.