Hello, I'm sorry if the title is not very clear. I have the following problem in Slackware-current. I needed support for a certain wireless card (broadcom 4311) which has a good working driver in the 2.6.24 kernel series. So, I downloaded 2.6.24.3 and custom-compiled it. The driver, b43, is compiled as a module, and I put /sbin/modprobe b43 in the corresponding rc.modules. With this, each time I start up the computer, the b43 module is loaded. The problem is that it doesn't always work (LED is red and the interface is not up). If I run modprobe -r b43 and then again modprobe b43, everything works fine. And this behaviour is random, some times it works fine at startup, some times not.

What can be causing this?
I tried putting /sbin/modprobe b43 in rc.local, tried loading the modules it depends on before it, etc., but all the combinations give the same random result.

If you are specifying the interface as wlan0 (for instance) in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf, then try adding

alias wlan0 b43

to /etc/modprobe.conf and remove the other modprobe entry you may have in rc.local.

That didn't work either.

It's weird because I did the same procedure a couple of weeks ago in this same laptop (upgrade to current from fresh 12.0, upgrade to 2.6.24) and it didn't happen then..

up.

Any more hints?

I'm not sure if it is necessary anymore, but I blacklisted the old module (bcm43xx) in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. This and adding b43 to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules was enough for me to get it working. I'm running a custom compiled 2.6.24.3 kernel on Slack 12.0.

in the latest -Current, bcm43xx has been blacklisted by default
make sure you merged the new blacklist.new

Yes, I had checked that thousands of times. bcm43xx is not even in my 2.6.24.3 custom kernel.