Well, after three days of working with it and no result, it looks like I am not going to be able to use Slack on this old computer. Everything else was fairly easy to sort out, but nothing I can do will solve the networking problem. I have worked in every networking config file on the system (inet1, wpa_supplicant, wicd.conf, and dhcpcd) to no avail. I continue to get the same results, and one other thread in the networking forum has yeilded no results. I fee bad about it. Slack ran great on this old dog.

Oh well.

Thanks to everyone who helped.

Bob

Could you give us some information on the wireless device? My googling suggests that this laptop may have been supplied with an Agere pcmcia device (like my Toshiba). If so, you may need a firmware upgrade.
Perhaps the output of 'lspcmcia' or 'lspci' shows some information?

Hi allend. To tell you the truth I got really frustrated with it (one of the very few times), and I went ahead and installed Fedora 13 on it because it set the wireless up (wpa and all) with two mouse clicks. But there is a price...Fedora runs like a dog on this old thing. It is usable with the LXDE desktop, and it is way too heavy weight. Slack was running great, fast as heck. But no matter what I did or tried I could not get ANY networking going, wired or wireless.

I am using a Belkin pcmia with a RT2500 chipset. This chipset is very old and there has been support for it since 2.6.23 in the kernel. The wireless hardware was not the problem. I had no problem connecting to the network with good signal strength. It would just never give me an IP address (see my previous posts here and on the networking forum.)

I was really disappointed. I will try again. I still have the 13 DVD.

Thanks for your help

Bob

maybe you can try the old stable drivers from before they merged into kernel back in 2008, from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rt2400/...

in my experience slackware was the first distro that, after following documentation, got everything working after an install: i.e., audio, cd, floppy, dvdburn, xorg, scanner, and even wifi... my previous exposure had been mepis, ubuntu, and opensuse, and usually they got most of everything nearly working, but there was always something like what you are going through now...

no matter which distro, there will always be some hairpulling issue at one time or another, and the solution isn't to find another distro, but to learn until issue is solved... for me the question was which distro is it easiest to learn about: the open sourced darwin of os x (not linux, i know) for which you have to purchase student developer membership to ever find the correct documentation? the redhat distro, geared towards enterprise linux where everyone is already supposed to be certified to learn how to get certified? the ubuntu distro, switched to more than any other distro, and therefore full of noobs posting dumb advice on forums and herds of other noobs following it? the fedora distro, with its pressure to lead, innovate, and be first, thereby missing the subgenius virtue of slack? or the slackware distro, with over 70,000 posts archived here at lq of slackers helping slackers learn linux...

Hi, slack-in-the-box,

You are, after all correct. It was a hair pulling experience. I installed both Ubuntu and Fedora (both would not handle the graphics, but networking fine out of the box.) Slackware was the fastest and worked well with the vesa driver. So, I should have left well enough alone and solved the networking issue in Slack (see my other post.) It isn't perfect, but I do have networking going and Slack is smooth and fast on this old machine. In my head, I somehow knew I would be coming back to Slack.

Thanks for the advice. It is well taken.

Bob

I've tried several other distros on my old laptop, with varying success over the years, starting with Corel Linux and then RedHat 6.

After my last head trip of thinking I wanted to learn Visual Studio, when I upgraded the thing from Win2K (ran pretty well) to WinXP (ran dog slow), I have changed for the last time and have installed Slackware 13, upgraded to 13.1.

It runs very snappy, especially compared to Windoze.

KDE crashes, but I like XFCE better anyway, and it runs a bit leisurely under X so I tend to stick with the command line as much as I can.


The laptop is a Compaq Armada 1700, 266MHz PII, with 92 Megs of RAM and a 12G hard drive. The batteries are shot and there's a short in the power cord, but there's still plenty of useful life left in this old box.