Hey everyone,
I've had Slackware 10.1 over the past couple of months, but never did figure out how to get my wireless card working on it. I just noticed Slackware came out with 10.2, so I'm downloading that right now, and I'm going to reformat my Slackware partitions on this laptop.

I am a VERY beginner when it comes to linux. So please bear with me, and try to keep things somewhat simple and explained well. Sorry to have to ask that, but I figure it's better to get that into the open now, rather than 1/2 way through, telling you I have no idea what you're talking about.

So, how will I need to go about getting my Dell 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI wireless card working on Slackware 10.2? I don't know anything about "modules" except that they exist. Is that the route I need to go? Or will I need to recompile my kernel, etc...?

If there are man pages you can refer me to, or if there are tutorials, etc... that you think would help, please let me know.

Thanks so much,
David

The real info you need is the chipset the card uses. I've got a 1350 in my laptop and it runs on a Broadcom chipset, which unfortunately doesn't have a linux driver. I'm guessing the 1370 uses Broadcom as well, but just to make sure, open a console and run lspci as root. You'll get a lot of information back, but there should be some indication of a Network controller or an Ethernet controller (probably both). If you don't understand what you're seeing, post relevant output.

If you do see it is a Broadcom chipset, about your only choice is ndiswrapper, which is a kernel module that allows you to use a Windows driver under Linux. At least with my card, it works pretty well. There are good installation instructions on ndiswrapper at their wiki site (see my sig for the link).

Hey, thanks for the response. I've had some help from a friend over at another forum working on the ndiswrapper, as that is what's required. Here's what's going on now:

I have ndiswrapper installed, as well as the driver for the card. When I run ndiswrapper -l, it tells me the driver and the hardware is present.

So now, I want to load the module. I'm reading these instructions on something I printed out off the ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net site (my friend gave me the link to them).

So I want to run: depmod -a

When I do, I get the following error:
*** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.31/misc/ndiswrapper.o

Any ideas?

Thanks so much,
David

Can I ask what kernel you're running? And did ndiswrapper compile cleanly?

The kernel is the default Slackware kernel - 2.4.31.

When you ask "did ndiswrapper compile cleanly" are you asking if I got any errors? I didn't notice anything. It seems to work just fine.

Someone over on another forum told me to run depmod -ae and post the results. So if it helps, here are those results:

depmod: Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.31/misc/ndiswrapper.o
depmod: USBD_InterfaceReference
depmod: usb_exit
depmod: USBD_InterfaceGetUSBDIVersion
depmod: USBD_InterfaceQueryBusTime
depmod: wrap_submit_irp
depmod: USBD_InterfaceQueryBusInformation
depmod: usb_exit_device
depmod: usb_init
depmod: USBD_InterfaceSubmitIsoOutUrb
depmod: USBD_InterfaceIsDeviceHighSpeed
depmod: USBD_InterfaceDereference
depmod: usb_init_device
depmod: usb_exports
depmod: USBD_InterfaceLogEntry
depmod: wrap_submit_urb

Thanks,
David

Hm. It is definitely complaining about USB. I'd try one of two things. If you're feeling lucky, you could just try loading the module and see if it happens to work. Otherwise, I'd try compiling ndiswrapper again and see if the errors go away. Since ndiswrapper can support USB devices, I'm guessing that it needs USB to have different support than is in the stock Slackware kernel.