Hello Everyone

To all those who gave me assistance during my recent failed attempt to get the network running on the old P4 laptop, I thank you again. After turning to both Fedora and Ubuntu thinking that was going to solve it, I learned that Slack is still king and I should have persevered and solved the networking problem and kept Slackware installed in the first place.

Well, I am now reinstalling Slack, and before I do, I would just like to ask two questions.

1. I cannot get X running with the drivers that the kernel inserts after the install. Is there a way I can go ahead and specify the "vesa" driver be used during the install to save time?

2. Is there some way to check my network connections during the install to try and prevent the DHCP issues I had the first time? If you will recall, I got a connection to the network, but no IP address was offered.

I appreciate any help

Bob

Hi,

Try using search feature, there's ample information spread here about both your questions.

Good Luck!

Thank you for your post. Yes, I am sure I could have found it when I did search the first time somewhere in the 100 + posts about compiz, just thought I might get a quick tip

Bob

1) There is an example xorg.conf-vesa in /etc/X11 you may need to edit a abit though.

2) You are installing over the network? Or just want to setup networking?

Didier made a post a few weeks back with some valuable insights into how the framebuffer/modesetting now works. You may find it useful.

Well, thanks again, guys, but same story on this install. Got everything working but networking. I will tell you, this has been the toughest problem I have ever incurred in Linux and it appears that it is a tough for everyone because I have posted this issue on three different forums and consulted a Linux pro here in town. No one seems to have heard of this before and no one has been able to direct my investigation.

I set up /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 exactly the same as on another working setup I have, as well as wpa_supplicant, and I continue to get exactly the same results. The odd thing to me is that it effects wired connections as well. The only clues I have are from dmesg:

and further down:

It appears to be DHCP related but I just can't figure it out. Especially why it works for one machine and not the other.

I continue to get this:

It continues that for about ten lines and then times out.

Iwlist scan finds my network.

So, I have now re-installed three times, configured three times, same result. I would think this was an impossible taks except that other distros have no problem with the network interfaces, they just could not handle this graphics chip. Slack is the only one that will handle that with the vesa driver. But no networking.

Does anyone have any ideas where I could look?

Bob

I had a customer today and their router would associate, but not hand out an IP address. I just set a static IP and away I went.............sort of. The router proved to be bad. Linksys routers do this A LOT. Also there is ndiswrapper which may or may not help, I've been on both sides of that fence.

And why are you getting output about IPv6?

The router is brand new, and there are four other computers that network from it just fine. I wondered about the IPv6 output as well, but it has not been an issue on the other machines. I have found only one piece of information on the net about this issue and there was no resolve there either. If I had only one machine using the network, then I would try a static address. I did try it once by resetting the router temporarily and got the same result. The router is not a Linksys, it is a Zyxel which apparently have a good reputation.

Bob

I have one customer that has a Zytex so I can't speak as to it's reputation, but I wish that customer would throw it in the trash. You should be able to associate a MAC to an IP in the router so that the router always give the same IP to that machine. Set it static in the laptop. My network has all static with the router set to DHCP. This allows for static routing in the full time members of the network, while visitors phones and laptops are allowed to draw IP addresses. Setting infinite leases is another option if the router allows that.

yes, that was my next experiment. I am going to assign the laptop an address in the client list on the router and see if that makes any difference. I have alreadd tried setting a static address on the laptop to no avail, same results. I can see that it authenticates just fine, associates, and then disassociates and unauthenticates for some unknown reason. But this is the only machine I have that does this. As I mention, wired connection prodouces the same results, so it is an overall networking problem. It did occur to me that I have two laptops with similar names: bob-laptop and bob-laptop1 with of course difference wireless chips and different mac addresses, so I doubt that has any effect.

Bob

Hello, dive

Just trying to get networking setup. I will tackle other things later as I have a usable system now.

Hello GazL

That looks like it might be of great help. Just need to get networking going before I try to tackle the graphics.

Did you install wicd or are you just using what comes with the stock slackware?

Hi,

I have a Zyxel 630 and believe the Modem/router setup pool is 192.168.x.1-34 for wired and DHCP pool starts at 35. Of course this is all configurable.

I would setup a static IP for the wired first to confirm your install. Then test a wireless static IP. Do you have another wireless card for the laptop to make sure it's not the built in chipset?

I would disable the IPV6 by adding this to the '/etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf';

This will disable the automatic loading of ipv6, while also allowing you to load it manually later, if need be.

I am now using what comes stock with Slackware. On the previous install I did try wicd, but got no where with it.

Hello Onebuck,

I will try that as well. I did find one odd thing this morning. When I went into the router setup and checked the client list it is listing my other laptops hostname as the name of the SSID. which is "Sprocket" (my dogs name). My laptop's hostname is "bob-laptop" and the hostname of the troublesome laptop is "bob-laptop1". I do not know why the client list on the router would be listing its own name.

Thanks for the help

Bob

BTW: The network card is fine. It is the RT2500 chipset which as been natively supported since 2.6.23 (or before). The module it uses is the RT2500pci. It used to use the older RT2500 module but it would not work with WPA encryption. The new module does. I have used this card this four other distrobutions and Windows successfully. I don't believe it is the card.