The instalation is the defaut slack 12.1 on a hp nc8430 laptop with intel 3945ABG wireless card.

The card works flawlessly when I try to connect to a unsecured network but when I try to connect to a secure network with wpa_gui it just says "Could not get status from wpa_supplicant"


What is going on and how do i fix it?

do you have wpa_supplicant installed?
anyway you should try wicd for managing wireless, it works really well

This means either 2 things:
1) The driver wpa_supplicant is using is either lacking features or doesn't support them yet try invoking wpa_supplicant like this.

wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i <wireless interface> -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

2) If your system uses DHCP at bootup you may want to disable it, because when you are using a wireless network you never have used before and you don't have the passphrase for it, at boot time dhcp can't connect to the network and disables the wireless interface (sometimes) try doing this to see if this is actually the problem.

killall -9 wpa_supplicant
killall -9 dhcpd
ifconfig <wireless interface> down
modprobe -r <wireless module>

<disable the hardware with whatever key disables the wireless card on your laptop>

Now enable your wireless card and do this as root:
modprobe <wireless module>
ifconfig <wireless interface> up
wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i <wireless interface> -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Now run wpa_gui and when it says everything is okay (the keys and info were exchanged correctly) type this as root:
dhcpd <wireless interface>