This is the one:

I've never used a Broadcom wireless card, so I'm anything but expert on them. From comments I've read, they can be a pain to set up. However, there was a driver package produced for them for Salix 13.1. Not sure if its been updated for 13.37, but its worth a look. There are a couple of quite long threads regarding Broadcom wireless drivers, and there are almost certainly people in the Salix community still using them, so it would be worth your while having a look. The first thread to look at is here:

http://www.salixos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1063

Hopefully someone there will be able to help you get it running.

Paul.

Now I am completely lost - don't understand any of what I find there and don't know what to do next. Any suggestions?
Also, one more thing, where can I get a list of terminal instructions, or some way of trying to get some sort of competence in this area so that I can be a bit more self reliant or at least get to understand more about how Linux works?
Thanks,
Alan D

It can be daunting when you first encounter it. I can't help a great deal in this instance - never had anything to do with Broadcom wireless adaptors. However, there are some more instructions (I'm forever forgetting to check the wiki - its not as extensive as the Arch wiki, but it does have a lot of useful information. So, here is another URL for you:

http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.ph...Wireless_cards

That one does cover 13.37 as well as 13.1, so hopefully the directions may be enough to get you going. If not, I'd suggest joining the Salix forum and asking in the Problems section - one of the people who wrote the guide should be able to help you through it.

One of your best options would be to check the signatures from a number of the senior members on Linuxquestions. A lot of them have links to good introductory information for CLI use. Here is one you may find useful - a list of Bash commands with some explanations:

http://ss64.com/bash/

Another site that might be worth your while looking up is http://www.linuxcommand.org . I'm sure other people can suggest more sites worth looking out.

Good luck with the wifi card.

Paul.

Hello again,
and thanks Paul. Have downloaded the Shotts book pdf and I think I will be spending a lot of time with it. However, it is beginning to look as though it just might be easier to resume efforts with Zenwalk's password problem. - even if it means going through all 500 + pages of the book! !
Now, when we talk of the second prompt, are we talking about the opportunity to enter a cheatcode after the language window, or am I supposed to wait for lots of stuff scrolling down the screen, then going to smaller scrolling print before coming to what looks like a prompt? It says 'login: _' but the CD is still reading. When I type su here, it asks for password and I enter 'newpwd'. after about 30secs it continues booting, but when I try to do something that requires password, it still will not let me with 'newpwd'.
If I instead enter 'root' at that login, then enter 'newpwd', it replies with 'login incorrect', and continues until booting is complete. With everything else working so well, it seems incomprehensible that such an apparently simple thing like this hangs things up.
Has anyone any further ideas?

Alan D

With a relatively old Broadcom chipset, I suspect just about every disto will give you problems - that generation of Broadcom cards gave problems in just about every version of Linux, mainly because there were no really open source drivers for them. So you will probably end up with the same difficulty even if you do get past the root login problem with Zenwalk. At least, in the past, JP was very careful about distribution of potentially non-free code, so I' be suprised if the Broadcom driver you need is easily available in Zenwalk either.

The cheatcodes need to be entered after the inital language prompt, and before the boot proper starts. As to the login pompt you're seeing, the only reason you see that is because booting from the CD is a failry slow process. At that stage, the system is still under the control of the startup scripts, so you have no chance to acctually log in there. The way the Zenwalk (and most other live)Cds are built, a default user is automatically logged in to the graphic desktop.

The only other way you can test the root password you've set would be to wait until the desktop has come up, then press CTRL-ALT-F(2,3,4,5, or 6). That will open a virtual console and will give you a text mode log in prompt. You can try entering root and the password you've set there. However, if opening a terminal from the desktop and using 'su', then entering the root password doesn't work, I'd be astonished if that did....

I'd suggest asking on the Salix forum. Judging from the wiki entry and the discussion in the forum, there must be several Salix users with the same wirless card you have. They should be able to help you get the wireless running. While I may well be biased, I think you're more likely to have sucess that way than continuing with Zenwalk. If you've read the wiki article I pointed you to, you should have enough background to ask questions if you hit problems.

Paul.

Hi Paul,
But wireless does work with Zenwalk live and have no problem getting on line. This made me think that it might be easier to persue the password problem.

Ah. Sorry, I missed that. Hadn't realised that you had got wireless working under Zenwalk. In that case, I do have another suggestion - download the standard install CD and install from it. The installer is "borrowed" from the Slackware installer, though its even simpler than the original, since it doesn't give you choices of the software to install, it just installs everything. Its text-mode and pretty quick. The only bits that may be difficult for someone not used to Linux is partitioning (and it may do that automatically for a full disk install - not sure, I've never used that option). It will prompt you to set a root password, then prompt you to create a user on the first reboot.

I'm not sure if you can install it to a flash drive, but that is a problem you can look at later.

I'd have to say I don't think its a very good long term solution. I used Zenwalk exclusively (and quite happily) for several years, did quite a lot of packaging for it as well. In the end, I got fed up with JPs increasingly arbitrary decisions and the number of bugs that weren't being fixed. I'm not the only one that got fed up and left - Salix was developed mainly by ex-Zenwalk users.

Looking at the release candidate for Zenwalk 7.2, it has bugs that existed in 7.0 (must be 12 months or more ago), and there seems to be very little extra software in the repositories. JP has announced that he intends to use a lot more base Slackware packages, which will hopefully improve things, but he offended so many of the people who were willing to contribute to the distro that I suspect it may never recover completely.

If you can get some help getting the wireless to work under Salix, I think its a much better option, but then, I am just a bit biased.....

Paul.

Thanks Paul,
Will have to have a good think about this now.
Will report again as soon as I can
Alan