I aM a NeWbie (if not a newbie then just plain stupid, take your pick)

I load the driver 8211.o myself, its tainted and does'nt like to load thru the normal channels.
This has not been a problem for me in mandrake, my internet connection has been good.
However I'm missing something here in slackware.

I can ping myself but any other pings return "network unreachable"

root@darkstar:~# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:98:B2:B3:42
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1755 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:14 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:103487 (101.0 Kb) TX bytes:894 (894.0 b)
Interrupt:10 Base address:0x8400

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:100 (100.0 b) TX bytes:100 (100.0 b)

root@darkstar:~# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"Blitzz" Nickname:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.457GHz Access Point: 50:28:74:68:69:73
Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power=47 dBm Sensitivity:0/65535
Retry limit:3 RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:95 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

<The above output looks ok except I dont know about the -DS extension on IEEE 802.11, the output may be correct but I think my card is IEEE 802.11b.>

root@darkstar:~# lsmod
Module Size Used by Tainted: P
8211 64008 1
snd-pcm-oss 37252 0
snd-mixer-oss 11992 0 [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-intel8x0 17156 0
snd-pcm 55904 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-intel8x0]
snd-timer 13252 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-ac97-codec 37240 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-page-alloc 6004 0 [snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm]
snd-mpu401-uart 3136 0 [snd-intel8x0]
snd-rawmidi 12512 0 [snd-mpu401-uart]
snd-seq-device 3920 0 [snd-rawmidi]
snd 27460 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-ac97-codec snd-mpu401-uart snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device]
soundcore 3332 3 [snd]
usb-ohci 18888 0 (unused)
ehci-hcd 16872 0 (unused)
usbcore 58400 1 [usb-ohci ehci-hcd]
pcmcia_core 40032 0
ide-scsi 9424 0
agpgart 39576 0 (unused)


<I try to start a connection with dhclient with the following results:>

root@darkstar:~# dhclient eth0
Internet Software Consortium DHCP Client V3.0pl2
Copyright 1995-2001 Internet Software Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP
eth0: not found


I used the source code to make the driver (as I did with mandrake) and when I load it with insmod I get the usual
"loaded with warnings" returned.

Any ideas to help get this internet connection going would be appreciated.

PS: I hope darkstar is a default host name in slackware?
<edit>
Scratch this, I got it going. I searched some more and discovered something called /sbin/netconfig
I dont understand what worked, just messed with it for a while. Sorry to have wasted this space.

I wish I had an answer for you... in another thread, I got lots of help here to get an ADMtek 8211 card working in Mandrake. But now that machine has been converted to MEPIS, a Debian derivative, and the card won't go. I get the same error -- no wireless extensions -- so I wonder if that's something missing from the distribution. I could load the driver -- MEPIS actually includes 8211.o, so I wouldn't think I'd need to custom-compile it -- via modprobe, but it didn't actually work.

Then following some notes that helped on Mandrake, I added the alias line to the startup file, so it would be eth0. That caused the system to not boot at all -- it got into some kind of endless loop in the boot process, so I had to boot from CD (MEPIS is a live CD that also installs itself on HD, sort of like Knoppix but with more effort put into the HD installer) in order to remove the line.

If anyone understands how the wireless extensions work and load, or even where to find them documented, I'd be most appreciative.