Hi, I've been using Linux for about two months, and I recently migrated from Mandriva One version 2006.0 to SuSE 10.1. However, my wireless card (a Linksys WPC54G v1.2, which has a Broadcom chipset) doesn't seem to like SuSE as it did Mandriva. Ndiswrapper, which was fully integrated in Mandriva One, simply refuses to work despite the thread I posted at these forums, but I recently heard of the bcm43xx drivers. After trying to use the obsolete drivers from the official site, I was given a nice friendly "FATAL: Error..." message to which I could find no solution on their forums except a kernel upgrade to 2.6.17+.

So I looked for tutorials on how to do this. The instructions here worked flawlessly until towards the end, when it told me how to configure LILO. Thing is, SuSE 10.1 uses GRUB, whose configuration file (/boot/grub/menu.lst) seems quite different from LILO's. I applied what the instructions said to the best of my ability, but it doesn't want to cooperate. Now when I try to boot in the new kernel, this is what appears after it loads my hardware and stuff:

None of my lights (laser mouse, wireless card, etc.) come on, and in that command prompt, cd and ls are pretty much the only commands it seems to recognize. I looked in /lib/modules/2.6.17.5-default, and indeed there is no modules.dep file.

Here is the relevant part of my /boot/grub/menu.lst file's contents, in case it's needed:

And according to YaST, here is the structure of my hard drive (so you can tell between all those different HDA values ). As you can see, I installed Windows and created a FAT32 storage partition first:

All I can make out of the error messages I'm getting in the new kernel is that there should be a modules.dep file that's not there and that for some reason, it's not recognizing the swap or / partitions. And the fact that /boot/initrd is a symlink to /boot/initrd-2.6.16.13-4-default - without any other similar candidates that I can see it could be linking to - also strikes me as kinda odd... shouldn't this new kernel come with its own?

Being the newbie that I am, I'm completely lost. The installation seemed to go smoothly until now, and I can't find any instructions specific enough on the Web... Thanks in advance for any advice you can give!

Edit: I forgot to mention that in the configuration, I set up all the IEEE 802.11 stuff and the BMC43xx stuff in various places as modules. The modules have been successfully make install'd to /lib/modules... so is it possible to use those drivers without updating the kernel anyway? If so, how?

Update: I went to /usr/src/linux-2.6.17.5 and ran make modules_install again. This time, a /lib/modules/2.6.17.5-default/modules.dep file was created, but the new kernel is still saying it doesn't exist. This is weird...

I would recomiple the beast and run the make modules_install, again.. and then recopy the kernel image to your /boot and try it that way.

Copy the kernel image to boot. If your new kernel needs an initrd, you'll need one compiled with modules for THAT kernel and also placed in boot, with the appropriate path inserted into menu.lst.

Doesn't Suse offer a 2.6.17+ kernel already configured for Suse? You'll probably be successful and learn a lot in the end, but when Suse does upgrade your kernel (automatically?), will you have to do it again? Even thinking about it makes me thankful for Debian unstable.

@ Matir: Forgive my incompetence, but I'm not sure I get what you're saying... What precisely is the "image" in this case?How would it upgrade the kernel? Online? (Wouldn't that be ironic...) But seriously, I do have an ethernet cable, and since this is a laptop, I can move it next to my router and plug it in. How might one go about applying that upgrade?

Sorry for the confusion... "kernel image" is the term that usually applies to the final compiled binary version of the kernel. (i.e, the vmlinuz file)

Ah, I think I see... I'll have another whack at it tomorrow. For the moment, I'm kinda kerneled-out... I think I'd probably do something stupid if I tried it now.

First you'd have to find a Suse repository that has a newer kernel than the one which ships with the system. Sorry. I don't know enough about how Suse packaging works to be of any real help.

Okay, I see. I guess I'll start looking for some. Thanks for telling me about that.

Yast should have the ability to update the list of available packages: you can look there for a newer kernel version.

Well, I tried updating the kernel again using the newer version 2.6.17.6 from the beginning, but I got the same exact error message as before. I finally did find one 2.6.17 kernel RPM, but it doesn't seem to work too well for this purpose; "modprobe bcm43xx" doesn't give me a "FATAL" message like it did before, but it also doesn't set up any eth# or wlan# interfaces, which makes it just as useless. I think I'll go try Ubuntu out, since it supposedly supports BCM43xx, and wait until a version of SuSE based on the 2.6.17 kernel is released (when will that be, anyway? 10.2?). I just don't think four consecutive headache-filled days is a reasonable timeframe to get a driver working...

Thanks for the help nevertheless!

You'll probably have to set the alias for the bcm43xx module in modprobe.com