I was having problems with my network adapter so I turned on the debugging to help. I found my rtl8168d adapter needed firmware and the r8169 driver could not find it. I asked google. During my search I found that there is a git repository for the firmware.

http://lwn.net/Articles/294308/

As the article says it contains the normal kernel firmware plus other contributions which include the Realtek stuff I need.

Is this already in the slackware kernel and I missed it?
Or should it be in there either in the kernel-firmware package or a new kernel-firmware-extra package?

What do you think? Some of the stuff is not GPL2 but does have a permissive distribution license.

You are probably running one of the stable Slackware releases. Slackware-current (soon to become Slackware 14) uses this git repository for its kernel-firmware package. At this moment, the slackware-current kernel-firmware package contains a "20120622git" snapshot, i.e. very recent.

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

You are correct I am using 13.37. I am glad to see 14.0 will be different. I have rsynced with the current development and have put it on a laptop and given it a quick look. The machine I have been experiencing network problems with will have to stay with the 13.37 release because it's my wife's machine and is needed in working order.
Thanks for a quick answer and well done with the next release. Your effort is much appreciated.

Dunc.