Hi all!

I am new to Linux. Initially I tried Fedora Core 2, and everything installed perfectly! All my devices and my internet connection was installed without a hitch, which was a good start.

Recently I moved to Slackware 10 after reading so many positive reviews about this distro. And sure enough, after I installed it, I instantly fell in love with this distro! It was so fast, and everything was so smooth. It is in my opinion much better than Fedora Core2, or Mandrake 10 (which I tried before Slackware).

However, there is one problem with slackware. For some reason it doesn't set my network card well, so that I cannot get to the internet using my Slackware.

My computer is a laptop, and my internal network card is Broadcom 440x 10/100 Ethernet.

Any idea why it doesn't work? Any help would be greatly appreciated since I am totally in love with Slackware, but if it doesn't allow me to surf the net, it is greatly crippled.

Thank you all!

If everything is hooked up right, this might work. open a console and goto this directory /etc/rc.d then type" ./rc.inet1 " and see waht happens, if you dont get any errors try to logon to a site.

Hi BajaNick,

Thanks for your suggestion. Anyway, when I tried it, my network card had already been fixed. It turned out that I simply needed to download the driver from BroadCom website.

I ran into 2 other problems though.

1. When I tried to install Opera using an .rpm file, the system said like failed dependencies, sh required to run <filename.rpm>... can anyone tell me how to fix this? I installed all the packages included by the 2 Slackware CDs.

2. Everytime I log out from KDE Desktop environment and got out from the X environment back to the text-based environment, the graphics all get screwed. I mean, I cannot see any distinct text. There are lots of appearing and disappearing characters flashing around the top of the screen, but nothing comprehensible. It still responds to commands though, for example, if I write "xwmconfig", it will get into what I suppose is xwmconfig screen. As I've said, I cannot see any discernible text, but the screen did turn to blue, but still no comprehensible texts. Can anyone tell me what's wrong? The first time I installed Slackware, I chose the default kernel (which I suppose is bare.i) and it was okay. For this installation, I chose something different, i think adaptec. Do you think the problem lies in the kernel? How should I change back to bare.i? I've tried the instruction included in the Slackware book at www.slackware.org, and it tells me to copy the config and system map file to /boot (no problem here) and the image file to /vmlinuz. I cannot find /vmlinuz anywhere. There is vmlinuz and vmlinuz-ide-2.4.26 in the /boot directory, but those are files, not directories, and I cannot copy anything into those two files.

Thank you all. Will really appreciate any help. Thanks.

1) It's not recommended to use RPM on Slackware because it's not it's default package manager and you can have some troubles with that. It's going to fail on dependencies because Slackware doesn't have a RPM database of installed stuff (you can try a option that ignore dependencies) because it uses it's own kind of packages, TGZ (which are simply tar.gz files with a install script inside).
You can try a utility called rpm2tgz and then installpkg. But again, it would be better if you can compile the app from source or get some package for Slackware (www.linuxpackages.net has tons of them).
2) I don't know how to upgrade the kernel using packages, so i can't help you there, you might try some kernel compile guide from the stickys.

Use the opera 'static' version (.tgz or tar.gz).
Try turning off 'gpm' to fix the jumping text:
chmod 644 /etc/ rc.d/rc.gpm