This is my first time with Slackware (10.1), and I can say that this distro is
truly the easiest.
I started to use the Linux with Mandrake but I can tell that Slackware is
much better.

I have managed to compile the kernel 2.6.10 successfully and then I
installed the hostap driver for my Prism 2.5 wireless card.
In my neighborhood we have a local network and we are sharing the Internet
access through an gateway.
At first, I could get to the Internet through that gw but after some time
something happened and now I can't get out. I can only see my local network,
I even tried "route add/del default gw x.x.x.x metric 1" because it worked at first.
Also, I must mention that I tried to manage my networking with webmin which
was actually an rpm package so I needed to do rpm2tgz. That webmin was not working fine so I downloaded an tgz which now works.

My simple question is how can I, and what do I have to do to diagnose the problem?

Welcome to Slack

Well... the first thing I'd do is recompile the kernel, using the internal drivers for Prism 2.5. I've got 3 of those cards in 3 different computers (two Linksys WMP11, and one D-Link DWL-650), and in all three cases (well, both) the Kernel driver has worked the best. With the kernel driver, the device will be detected and installed as ethX. eth1 in my laptop, eth0 in both of the desktops because those two don't have an ethernet card.

When it's detected/installed as ethX, you just need to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf with the appropriate information. Static IP if you have it, ESSID, network key, or whether or not to use DHCP. All the routing information/etc is set up automatically when you use DHCP, and I'm guessing that the rc.inet1 script (which calls rc.wireless to bring up the card in question) will set up the appropriate information if you're using static, too.

It's just a guess, but I have a feeling that if you set it up that way, your problem will magically disappear.

If you are using dhcpd, one additional note. In the rc.6 script which shuts things down when rebooting or halting, the script in 10.1 that is supposed to halt dhcpd had a flaw. It used the killall command instead of the dhcpd -k command which instructs dhcpd to release it's ip lease correctly.

This results in dhcpd being unable to get an ip lease when you start.

An edit of the rc.6 file fixes this. I noticed that in the 10.2 and current versions this has been corrected.

Thank you both for the replies, but I found out that if I add this line in rc.local everything goes nice and easy:

route add default gw x.x.x.x metric 1

Also I would like to know is there a nicer way to do this somehow?
It is interesting that webmin didn't work for me like it should (I wonder why????).

By the way, sorry that I didn't mention that I'm using static IP.

Hi!
Did you edit this line in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf :

?

Cheers, Eric

Sorry for not answering you immediately.
No I didn't touch that, but now everything works fine with 'route add...' in rc.local.