...I have not only installed Slackware 11 on my new Compaq laptop, I actually cajoled ndiswrapper into working. That doesn't mean that my wireless network is one hundred percent up and running. Quite to the contrary at the moment. However, considering the time and effort it took just to get the little blue "the wireless adapter is up and running" light to come on under Linux, I am quite happy. I know all that's left now is to iron out some of the smaller details.

To pass on some helpful hints as far as ndiswrapper is concerned, don't attempt it with anything less than a 2.6 kernel. It wasn't until I compiled a kernel 2.6.17 that ndiswrapper even considered working. Under 2.4.33, it was like it didn't even exist. Secondly, if you have the Broadcom bcm43xx wireless adapter, use the latest versions of the drivers from HP (sp34152a.exe). If you don't run Windows, you can use cabextract to extract the drivers from the .exe file.

Now for the real fun, trying to get it up one hundred percent. The good thing is that everything works just fine on the Windows side.

Speaking of which, while it will come as no shock to anyone here, Windows Vista sucks more than anything that has ever sucked before. It is overblown, overly complex, and overloads anything less than absolute bleeding edge with over 2 gigs of memory. I got rid of it and installed Windows XP instead. It's much faster, has a much smaller footprint, and allows me to play DVD's full screen (wide screen, yeah!) without the ker-chunky-ness of Windows Vista. It's pretty bad when a 1.86GHz Celeron system with 1 gig of ram can't even think about playing a DVD smoothly.

Well, it's back to the grinder getting this machine to hop to the tune I call. I am sure if I can get ndiswrapper to at least recognize there's a wireless adapter in this machine, I can configure it to work with my wireless router. Wish me luck!

Blessed be!
Pappy

Overwrote Vista Home Premium.(On purpose)

hi. nice to be here.

I have been using Windows for the past 6 years. This is actually
my first time to use Linux. It's really different but I'm having a
great time. I'm really enjoying it.



_________________
Jon
Download free Funai service manuals

MythTV backend server, frontend PC, and python frontend on my xbox. Fixing my X server from command line i was quite happy with. O and Slackware fully running.

After almost a month, I finally achieved my goal. I not only got my Broadcom wireless adapter functioning under Linux, I finally got samba to work properly over the wireless adapter.

When I bought this laptop, it was my goal to get it to work completely under Linux. The first step was removing the atrocity that is Windoze Vista from the hard drive. While I know it will upset some of the Linux purists, I replaced Windoze Vista with Windoze XP. Since the laptop is for my business, and since my business files and database is set up under Access, I have to use Windoze. No, I am not going to trust Wine. I have had no luck with it. Windoze XP runs just great on this machine, so what the hell!

After the Windoze was installed, I set up the dual boot with Slackware 11 and the KDE desktop. That was the easy part. I then discovered that the wireless adapter built into this machine uses the Broadcom bcm43xx chipset. That meant getting the wireless adapter to run wasn't going to be easy. After compiling a 2.6.x.x kernel, installing ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant, the wireless adapter decided to work. A little more fudging with the system, including completely reconfiguring samba, and I can now share files from this machine with all the other machines on my LAN.

I feel like I really accomplished something completely cool. I am almost sorry that I finally got everything running properly. I guess I'll have to find something new and exciting to configure under Slackware. I'm sure I'll think of something!

Blessed be!
Pappy

Building a community web site running off a linux server, and findly moving over to linux and getting away from M$

TT

One word. Beryl.

Technical
Using bash indirect variables in a pair of nested loops to cut Oskar Andreasson's iptables reset/flush script in half & make it completely general. When they "invented" the raw table I added one line & the update was complete.

Teaching
Used Marcel Gagné's Moving to Linux to teach a 3-part Linux desktop beginner's class -- w/ paying students. Marcel even gave permission to call it Moving to Linux.

Promotional
Wrote & presented "Linux for Cowards" (tm) to almost 70 people at HAL-PC here in Houston. In spite of having my original promised & scheduled time slot given to M$ for an Office 2003 dog & pony show. I was really happy that they only got about 88 people attending; &, of course, I am convinced that some of them were really there to see my show.

Oh yes, it was largely about Knoppix, so I wrote the show in Impress & used Knoppix to present it. For fun I didn't tell this to the audience until the end.


Sorry, no links, may edit those in later.

Edit: I blogged more things here.

Just the rush of being Microsoft free for more than a month is enough of a high for me. Pure Linux!

Oh, getting all the multimedia support any human could want to run on Fedora is awesome.

Beryl is pretty fancy too.

Extract, encode as OGG & upload a CD to my FTP server with just Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and the power of KDE. I only realized how cool that was when I saw my Windows-using friend was gaping.

The absolute coolest thing was be able to transform my "hobby" into a paying gig.

486dx/2 (66MHZ) with a 60GIG HD :P
distro, debian 4.0
kernel 2.6.18-6-486
32MB ram

Well... fun is cool, too. A few years ago I had a pair of old laptops. Both were so old there were no card slots. One was an early toshiba with a 386-10 and 4 meg of memory. The other was an off brand - 386-15 with 5 meg of memory. Both had 120 meg hard drives. I never tried to run X on either one. The off brand had been physically repaired a couple of times and was ugly. A bolt and nut passed right through the top to hold it together with one of the hinges. I networked the pair through the serial ports. I took them to some of the lug meetings for show n tell. Hostnames: The off brand was "frank" and the Toshiba was "stein". When connected I had frank n stein http://www.artiajans.net

oh yeah i forgot.. the 486 resides in my office allong with a p3
the P3's name is hopper, the 486 is chibihopper