I would like to try kernel 2.6.17-rc5 on my laptop because it has build-in support for my WLAN card. Apart from that, I'd like to stick as much as possible with Slackware-stable and not use Slackware-current.

IIRC from some posts here on LQ, udev needs to be upgraded from -stable for kernels 2.6.14 and above. Is the udev package from -current the right one to use?

Is udev the only package that I would need to pull from -current to get the latest kernel to work?

I compiled 2.6.16.6 (I think) and everything seemed to work alright for me. I would say that the udev from current should work. I upgraded to current and it seems to work alright for me.

That's just wrong. I'm running 2.6.16.19 with Pat's udev-064 package which was installed by Slackware 10.2. No problems at all.

That said, it can't hurt to install the udev package from -current. Grab the new hotplug package as well while you're there.

I'm running a couple of different 2.6.17-rcX kernels on a stock 10.2 machine (fully patched of course) for the Broadcom WLAN support and I haven't noticed any problems from using the 10.2 udev.

I have a PCMCIA card with a Broadcom 43xx chip which is why I wanted to try 2.6.17.

I've downloaded and tried to setup rc5 but I just cannot seem to find the relevant option for the bcm43xx driver. I've compiled a kernel with just about every option checked and there's no bcm43xx module.

Can you perhaps point me to the correct option in menuconfig?

If the patch has applied correctly, then you first need to get into Networking and enable Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack. Once that is checked, then you should be able to see the bcm43xx driver in Device Drivers > Network Device Support > Wireless LAN (non-hamradio). You do have to have the generic IEEE stack selected before you can see the bcm43xx driver.

If you don't see the generic IEEE stack, then odds are the patch didn't apply correctly.

This is what confuses me. If the bcm43xx is included as of -rc2, what patch has to be applied?

Ah, now I get where you're stuck. The 2.6.17-rcX kernels aren't distributed as a full kernel source package. In other words, if you download 2.6.17-rc5, you should be getting a file called patch-2.6.17-rc5.bz2, and you can't compile that into a functional kernel. Instead, you have to download the full source for 2.6.16 (NOT 2.6.16.x) and apply the 2.6.17-rc5 patch. It is actually pretty easy. Download both the full 2.6.16 kernel source and the 2.6.17-rc5 patch and uncompress them both. Next, drop into the linux-2.6.16 directory and run

patch -p1 < /path/to/patch-2.6.17-rc5

As long as you don't get any errors, you should be able to configure and compile the kernel as you normally would.

Hmmm I downloaded a full -rc5, the file name is linux-2.6.17-rc5.tar.bz2, 40MB in size. That should be all, and the kernel does work. But I have found the bcm43xx option now, the problem was probably the missing "Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack". Thanks.

???

Have a look in here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/

To me, it looks like you can get the full kernel source package from there.

udev:

Yes, udev-064 sort of works for newer kernels, but it is very broken regarding input devices (check the contents of /dev/input on a newer kernel if you are still using the old udev).

udev-071 is the minimum specified in the kernel ChangeLog, and 072 provides a few more bugfixes to make 071 useable.

bcm43xx driver:

uselpa, if you're trying to use this driver with a BCM4318, you might run into problems (the fix is expected in 2.6.18-rc if you do run into problems). Other BCM43xx chipsets are fine. You also need the firmware for this device installed in /lib/firmware. Don't use your Windows drivers for them, Google for a file called "wl_apsta.o" and rip the firmware out of that (apparently it has the latest firmware version).