I am having trouble getting my computer to access the internet in slackware. What I have is a dual boot (xp and slack) dell laptop with a broadcom ethernet card. I live on college and my connection is straight ethernet. With XP all I had to do was install the broadcom driver and I had access: i didn't have to configure anything. I also had mandrake on my computer before slackware and the internet worked without me having to do anything. I also have the gentoo live cd, and the internet "just works" with it. With both of these linux distros I don't have to do anything to make it work. I know that slackware involves a bit of configuring to get things right so I understand it not working correctly without configuring. So any ideas on how to configure my ethernet?

If you have a Broadcom BCM4401 built-in card then you should be able to type (as root) /sbin/modprobe bcm4400 at the command line. If this works then you need to add the command to the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules startup script so it will start on startup.

I found that at http://oboc.ucdavis.edu/Marik/inspiron/ through typing in broadcom modprobe into google.

If you have a different card, then that command may not work.

I have a Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller. I tried the module b44 (I don't have bcm4400) and it still doesn't work.

http://home.earthlink.net/~xtrem1/Insp5100Dell.html

You might find that inforative....

all right that last site is nice, and I followed its instructions for network:

(the instructions that come with the driver are basically the same)

" After you have linux installed you can unzip the file to a directory of your choice. (I prefer /usr/src [must be root])
a. unzip linux.zip
b. cd bcmCD_4401_v6.9.3/Drivers/linux/
c. tar xzvf bcm4400-2.0.2.tar.gz
d. cd src
e. make; make install
f. depmod; modprobe bcm4400
g. set up your network however you do in your particular distro."

I tries to follow it like so with the exception that the newest driver is 3.0.7 not 2.0.2:
I got the tar.gz file into /usr/src
tar xzvf bcm4400-3.0.7.tar.gz
cd src
make; make install
depmod
modprobe bcm4400 --- doesn't work. says I do not have the module installed either at all or incorrectly...I know its installed because I looked in the net modules where the modprobe says it should and where broadcoms readme says it should be and it is there. How can I make it be detected correctly?

Alright I finally got it working

What was making the new drivers not work was I had left the B44 in the rc.modules. I commented it out and I am typing this in firefox in linux.

sweet deal!