Installing A Realtek Wireless Card On OpenSuSE Linux 11

I've been using my Medion Akoya E1222 netbook for about a year now and I still think it's an awesome little machine. Recently, I decided to swap from Ubuntu to another Linux distro and have been experimenting with Fedora, JoliOS, PuppyLinux before finally going for OpenSuSE. The only problem I had was figuring out how to get the wireless card working.

I had a little bit of trouble tracking down this information, so I thought I would put it here both for future reference and for anyone else looking for the same information. This is mainly specific for my netbook and particular distribution, but it might help others with the same sort of problems.

The first thing you need to do is find out if your system can actually see the wireless card. This can be done using the lspci command, which in my version of SuSE needed to be called directly from its location in the sbin directory.

/sbin/lspci

This will print out a large list of different devices that are connected to your machine. You can add the -v flag to get more information about each device if you need to, but the default behaviour was enough for me. Within this list should be a record of your wireless network card. Here is the entry on my Medion netbook for both of my network cards (wired and wireless).

01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8132 Fast Ethernet (rev c0)
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8191SEvB Wireless LAN Controller (rev 10)

As this is a Realtek wireless adapter we need to download the correct driver and install it. A quick Google search finds the following page with the needed Linux drivers. You need to match up the correct card version with the correct driver. In my case I downloaded the RTL8191SE driver, which did the trick.

RTL8191SE driver

Once the file is downloaded and unzipped we can then move onto the unzipped directory and install the driver. The driver is ready to be compiled and installed, but the system might not have the needed tools to allow you to do this. If you type in the Linux "make" command and you get a "command not found" response then you'll need to install the needed packages. By entering the following command you can get the needed packages ready for you to make and install the driver.

sudo zypper install automake make linux-kernel-headers kernel-desktop-devel kernel-syms gcc

Once the system is ready you can make and install the driver by running the following commands (press enter after each command).

sudo su
make
make install
exit

The sudo su command puts you into superuser mode, which allows you to run make and make install to build and install the driver without running into permissions issues. The exit command then exists the superuser mode. After rebooting you should find that your network now contains your wireless card information, allowing you to connect to the network of your choice.