I have exhausted my eyes and brain to the point of falling asleep at my desk trying to figure this out.

returns that it is a Broadcom BCM43xx

No big deal, so I go to check the kernel to see what is enabled or disabled, and it is enabled as built in. I changed what I could to M, and re-compiled and installed the kernel and rebooted, and still nothing. I don't even show a wlan0 interface.

I downloaded the newest, stable kernel, 2.6.33.1 and installed it, and still nothing.

I ended up enabling every single wireless module in the kernel, and stil no results.


I popped in a Unity Linux LiveCD to see what module it was using, because with Unity, the wireless works great. It said module 'wl'

When I tried:

it said no module found.


Am I completely missing something simple?

Thanks for any help, Paul

I use one of these Broadcom cards, but not on one of my Slackware machines.

But in general, if support has been compiled as a module, doing a "modprobe bcm43xx" manually ought to bring up the interface.

My bad.

Now that I've been able to check the machine with the Broadcom card at home to refresh my memory, I'm reminded that it's a bit more complicated.

First off you may (or may not) need to download/compile/install the appropriate Linux Broadcom driver, the proprietary firmware b43-fwcutter, and/or some of their constituent components from here: http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php The notebook I use the Broadcom card on is Ubuntu, rather than Slack, so I had gotten the appropriate components from one of the Ubuntu repositories.

Now my "Broadcom" machine (Thinkpad T23) has a Broadcom BCM4311 by Linksys. Once I had the driver components installed, in order to activate the card properly I found I had to use the following 4 modprobe lines in order:

modprobe -r b43 b44 ssb wl
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
modprobe wl
modprobe b44

Since autodetect at boot does nothing for this card, I added the 4 modprobe lines to my rc.local

The card works perfectly with the native drivers, but it was something of a research problem to get it going. Hope some of this is translateable to your Slack notebook.

Oh, its not a notebood. Its a regular desktop dinosaur, haha. I shall give these things a try as soon as I get home. Thanks for the information!

--Paul--

Thanks again for the info!


I followed the directions on the Broadcom site and got my wireless card to pop up.

When I did it set my SSID, and then when I did it timed out. so I rebooted and had to go to the folder where the module was unpacked, and then do this again:

and then all was good, wireless worked and was able to connect to servers.

Where do I need to put the wl.ko module so it will be loaded at boot and I don't have to re-type all this stuff when I boot the machine?

Thanks for the help!

--Paul--

If the kernel detects the card, do this first before you start looking for other things to install. A lot of drivers/firmware come built-in/packaged with Slackware.
Install the wicd package from /extra/wicd/wicd-1.6.2.1*.txz. This is the wireless network manager that allows you to enter your encryption keys, which network to connect, etc without having to edit your config files.
Reboot. When your desktop comes up, you will see a wireless network applet come up on the system tray. Left-click it once to see if it is scanning the wireless signals. If it does, select your router and enter the information to connect. Done
FYI - if your ESSID broadcast name has a space in it's name and shows up as <Hidden> in the wicd scanning dialog box, you will need to get the source for wicd-1.6.2.2 and recompile it using the SlackBuild in /extra/source. Wicd-1.6.2.1 has this bug, but it may not affect you.

I have installed the drivers provided by Broadcom's website, and they are working, I just need to know whats the next step so that they will be loaded at system boot.

You can put the module's directory wherever you wish. Add your 4 commands to the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. In the commands in rc.local, include the full path to the module directory, so that the machine can find it when rc.local runs. And you should be done.

so when I add the insmod command to the rc.local, it would look something like this?


correct?

Should work fine. Although if the Broadcom package included a "make/make install" compiler routine, I'm not sure why the wl.ko would not have installed itself somewhere under /lib/modules/[kernel version]/ whereupon you'd just use "modprobe wl"

At any rate, it sounds like you're there.