wifi adapters causing kernel lockup
I've been using Slackware on this laptop for three years now. It's a HP Pavilion ze4315us running Slackware 10.2 with a 2.6.17 kernel. It has no built-in 802.11 so I use cardbus and usb adapters. I have four different ones, each uses a different driver, and with each I've experienced some type of (kernel?) crash. Sometimes everything freezes and the display slowly tints yellow while vertical lines appear. Sometimes just the keyboard stops responding and I don't notice until I try to type because the mouse still works. Although it happenes rarely, it's still annoying when it happens.
Most recently, and what causes me concern is, I left the laptop running a screensaver (xspirograph within Fluxbox) for about 5 hours. The screen was down which turns off the display, which I believe is BIOS-controlled on this model. My usb 802.11g adapter was plugged in, the zd1211 driver loaded, but not connected to any ap. When I came back the keyboard was not responding and the hard drive and memory areas were very hot. The heat is the part that concerns me. I wouldn't want it to crash again while I'm away and have the cpu or hard drive overheat to the point of damage.
Three reasons that I'm sure it's caused by the wifi adpters or drivers is 1) this has never happened when connected via dial-up, 2) this has never happened when connected via 10/100 ethernet, and 3) this has never happened when I know that none of the wifi drivers are loaded. The four cards I have are:
Netgear MA111 802.11b using linux-wlan-ng
Netgear WG511 802.11g using ndiswrapper
Netgear WG511U 802.11g using madwifi
Hawking WU54G 802.11g using zd1211
Does anyone know a workaround or better driver for one or more of these cards? If more information is needed I can get it when I get back to the laptop.
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