Problem: After installing Linux (SUSE Linux 11.1) on an Acer® E725-434G32MI Notebook, neither the ethernet device nor the WLAN device is available.

Note: Since you cannot connect to the Internet -where the drivers are-, it appears to be a good idea to use a well supported USB WLAN stick in order to get connected in the first place :-)

Broadcom® BCM4312 WLAN driver installation

First of all, make sure you have the right device installed.
Type

lspci -nn | grep Broadcom

as root. You should see a line like

Installing the broadcom-wl-kmp-default driver from the packman repository with yast (SUSE Linux 11.1)

Install the package broadcom-wl-kmp-default from the packman repository.
You may need to insert the module, type

modprobe wl

as root on a console. Now you should be able to configure this device with yast.

Installing the 802.11 Linux STA driver provided by Broadcom

You can download the driver from http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php. It was not necessary for me to use this driver, so I can't tell you more about installation specifics.

Atheros® AR8121/AR8113 PCI-E Ethernet Adapter driver installation

Type

lspci -nn | grep 1969:1062

as root. You should see a line like

If so, you can use the atl1e driver provided by Atheros. This one is hard to find, it took me hours of time to search the Internet for a matching driver for this device. However, you can download the driver from http://partner.atheros.com/Download.aspx?id=125

Note: In order to compile the module you may need to install the kernel source and kernel headers.

Follow the instructions from the readme file. After having installed the module (make install) you'll need to insert the module:

modprobe atl1e

If you got no error message, you should now be able to configure this device.