Here is a little about the system:
joe@joe-laptop:~$ sudo /sbin/lspci
Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)----works great

Modem: ALi Corporation Intel 537 [M5457 AC-Link Modem]----havn't even messed with it.

Network controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 4320 (rev 02)----works great using the ndiswrapper.

CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller----not tested

USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 50)----not tested

USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 50)----see above

USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 51)----see above

FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)---modules load great--no device to test with

Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller----works great

VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 340M----works good enough for me<not a gamer> Might also be the root of the problem.

****And now for the rest of the Story****
OS Slack 9.1 full install.

2.6.5 #3 Mon Apr 12 23:52:19 CDT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

lilo bootloader.

**and now for the explaination of my crazy subject**

This laptop will not cold boot(as in cold--powered off to on, with cold hardware).
If the hardware has been off for some time and has reached room temperture, I would say just below 30Celius, It will not fully boot the kernel. And I am not talking about just the 2.6.5 kernel I am also including the 2.4.22 kernel included with Slack 9.1. Same results booting from removable device, ie knoppix, slackware cd. It WILL cold boot with WARM hardware from any of these!

ACPI is compiled in the kernel and I have done some research in this area. This is how I know the temperture after a finally successfull boot: (guess I should say reboot here.)

joe@joe-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature
temperature: 29 C

On occasion Lilo will show some garbled ASCII characters after selecting the image to boot. Leading me to believe the IGP is the root of the evil.

Otherwise this is a great laptop and if anyone needs help gettin like hardware to work in Slack, I would be glad to help.

This laptop was bought this past Sat.
Sorry for being long-winded.

Your thoughts or suggestions on this matter are appreciated.

Oh and it did not have this problem with the preinstalled windersxp homo.

Thanks

Joe--

I have the same laptop, I am trying to configure the integrated wireless card with mandrake 10 using ndiswrapper 4.0.

How did you make this work? When i use iwconfig, it shows the device "wlan0" with all other detail. It is always stick to 802.11g protocol with bit rate 54Mbps and unable to change it to Managed mode with my ESSID. If you are sucessful running under 802.11b please let me know how.

Sankar Shanmugam

Well we Slackers don't download rpms unless we have to. But that is OK. You should be able to download the ndiswrapper-0.6.tar.gz source tar ball and follow these simple steps to compile the wrapper.

Download tar ball to suitable path, ie /usr/src

Untar it like so.

tar -zxvf ndiswrapper-o.6.tar.gz
This will create a folder of the same name minus the tar and gz with the contentsof the tar ball inside it.

After that be sure to read the README and the INSTALL files.

Basicly I just did a.

cd ./ndiswrapper-0.6

make

make install

after this is done ndiswrapper should be ready for use.

You will then need the XP drivers for that device.
you can get them here ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/softwar...-1/SP23084.exe

run that exe in windows and it will extract to c:\swsetup\sp23084a or to you choice location.

Move that sp2304a dir to you linux drive. Preferably somewhere it will not be bothered.
i would suggest /usr/src/sp2304a You could choose a more descriptive folder name for it like broadcom or driver or something. Anyways, after that, you need to follow the instructions for preparing the XP drivers for use by ndiswrapper.

Something like

ndiswrapper -i /pathtodrivers/bcmw15a.inf
then do a
ndiswrapper -l to make sure it installed

Then to activate the device it's a simple
modprobe ndiswrapper

The device should be working after that.

my output of iwconfig

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462GHz Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
Bit Rate:54Mb/s Tx-Power:16 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key: off
Power Management: off
Link Quality:100/0 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

<--snip-->


I have never had to change the mode manually.

To find an access point i just do a
iwlist wlan0 scanning

Whatever cell it finds I do a

iwconfig wlan0 essid "essid value" and I noticed that it seems to auto switch to 802.11b when that is the type of AP that I am connecting to.

and finally to get an address I do a

dhcpcd wlan0
or you could manually configure the address using ifconfig wlan0 yadda yadda yadda.

you should also be able to do a
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc or managed to change modes.

Have not tried this... mine stays in managed.

Hope that wasn't too lengthy.

Joe-

Anyone that has a very similiar laptop and hardware, that is not experiencing this problem. Could you please inform me of some of your boot configurations. Kernel version. lilo.conf file, or grub.conf files. Sometimes it appears to freeze before it does the BIOS downloads or whatever and I think that I might disable that in lilo.conf. I'm running out of things to try and I would appreciate the ideas.

It's just crazy to have to boot the cold laptop into XP for a few minutes in order to boot in Slack. There has to be something I need to change in my boot loader config.

Thanks

Joe--