Hi everyone. After installing slackware 10.2 I managed to get my broadcom wifi card working with ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper compiled without a problem, and I used ndiswrapper -m to modprobe ndiswrapper at startup, and edited rc.wireless.conf with my essid and network details. I also entered the details in KDE's wireless configuration gui via wifimanager.

Problem is ndiswrapper doesn't always load at startup (sometime it does though?) so I have to manually modprobe it. Also, in order to connect I have to manually type dhcpcd wlan0 in a terminal.

I kind of expected that I would need to do some sort of manual configuration in slackware (in fact I've installed it so I can learn more about how to do these things manually). But I would appreciate any advice about how to ensure my wireless connection is established automatically at boot up.

I'd just enter the needed commands into your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. In my experience, the Slackware wireless config files don't work very well with ndiswrapper, so a script is a better option.

I found the way ndiswrapper -m worked was unreliable. Instead I undid that by removing the line it made, and then adding a line to /etc/rc.d/rc.local that says

/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper

From there it works every time. The problem with settings is likely related. You can't apply network settings to an interface that doesn't exist, and if ndiswrapper isn't loaded the interface doesn't exist.

Thanks for this. I'll give these suggestions a try and let you know.

If you add that line at the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.modules so that the driver gets loaded a lot earlier in the boot process, then rc.inet1 can configure your card just fine.

Make sure that in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf you have IFNAME[1]="wlan0" defined for your card, because the Slackware default is to assume that you only have "ethX" interface names. In your case of "wlan0" you will have to explicitly name it.
If you did not setup your wireless network card in slot 1 of /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf (all the VARIABLENAME[1]="..." settings), please change the [1] to the appropriate value.

You should end up with something like this in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf (again assuming you're using slot [1]):

These are the non-wireless related network settings. The wireless configuration was already done in /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf so you should not need to touch that file now.

Eric

Tried this and it seems to work. Many thanks.

Steve