Hello everyone,

I'm brand-new to Slackware, after using various distributions on an off over the past half decade.

I just finished installing Slackware 12.1 on a Presario F700 laptop I have, and my first order of business is to get wireless up and running.

The included wireless card is an Atheros 5007. I've read numerous forums and countless threads on Atheros and Madwifi and getting them to come together and get me on the intrawebs.

I'd been trying to use http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php as a guide, but it doesn't appear to be working. I downloaded all the files for madwifi and copied them to my laptop. When I did "installpkg madwifi-r3653_20080521_2.6.24.5_smp-i486-1alien.tgz", I only got one line of text: "Executing install script for madwifi-r3653_20080521_2.6.24.5_smp-i486-1alien." Then back to the prompt.

So I'm assuming it worked. Following that, I added "/sbin/modprobe ath_pci" to rc.modules in /etc/rc.d and rebooted.

After restarting, I tried ifconfig and iwconfig to get a MAC address for ath0 and continue... but there's no ath0.

So where did I go awry? I know I'm just tipping the iceberg and there's a lot of lumps to be taken en route to figuring out Slackware, but getting online is the first big step.

Is there any advice on what to do/where to go next?

EDIT: I figured it out. Whew... can't lie, I feel awfully triumphant, haha.

The polite thing to do would be to post your solution for those who might be having the same problem.

He probably found out that the mainline madwifi driver does not support the Atheros AR5007 chip that is inside his computer.
Instead, you have to grab a snapshot from madwifi's madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6 branch - here is the SVN access http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/branc...-hal-0.10.5.6/ and here is where you get snapshots for it: http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/
With a little fiddling you can use my madwifi.SlackBuild to create a package with this snapshot.

Eric

Bingo. Was just going to post that. I used that snapshot and the Newbie HOWTO (http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo) and it started right up. I had to use dhcpcd in lieu of dhclient to get my IP address, but start to finish I had my wifi up in a matter of minutes once I had the right snapshot.