HOwdy folks, i just got me a new laptop Acer Aspire 3000 (2800XP - 512 Ram - 80GB) so should have no problems running any linux distribution, HOWEVER i completely hate windows and anything to do with it and am quite a linux n00b.

Inside my laptop there is a 54Mbps Wireless Adapter and i no that this is probably gonna be anoying to get working with any linux, however i am determined to do it....

I was wondering if anyone else had done anything like this or knows how i can do it before my laptop goes flying out the window and the router down the toilet...

If anyone can help that would be great.

//Ollie

Broadcom wireless chipsets for 802.11g are not natively supported in Linux as far as I know. So, getting wireless to work can be more or less cumbersome because you might have to use the ndiswrapper driver which requires that you feed it the WIndows driver files for your card!
I am typing this message on my laptop with a wireless connection, and I run Slackware 10.2, so your chances for success are more than zero percent :-)

If you can not get it to work with Slackware 10.0 I would also suggest you use Slackware 10.2 on your laptop. Slackware 10.0 was the first to support wireless interfaces other than 16-bit PCMCIA, but Slackware 10.2 has much improved scripts. If you feel not too noob-ish and are interested you should read a little more about wireless support in Slackware's rc scripts . That link contains the updated rc.inet1 and rc.wireless scripts that Slackware 10.2 uses, and that you can also use in other Slackware 10.x releases.

Look on the ndiswrapper Wiki site if your card is listed there: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...dex.php/List#B and get a ndiswrapper package for Slackware here . I have no binary package for Slackware 10.0 but you can build your own using the sources and script in the "build" directory at the above URL.

Eric

ill look at those sites in just a second, well at least there is chance, and if i dont support the crappy internal one ill just buy a pcmcia one and hopefulyy that should sort it, thx for the info...

hey Alien bob what wlan card do u have i think im just gonna buy one of them as this stupid internal shindig aint working???

Any card with a RaLink or Atheros chipset will have a supporting Linux driver (although these drivers are not part of Slackware - yet).
Although you never know.... these WLAN card and chip manufactureres crank out new chipsets faster than the Open Source community can support, it seems.

My laptop has an Atheros chip onboard (supported by madwifi) and my desktop has a RaLink chipset (rt200 actually, supported by the rt2x00 project

And as of release 2.6.14 the IPW (aka Intel Centrino) driver is part of the standard kernel...

The ndiswrapper will get you quite far if you own none of the above.

Eric