No wifi on Thinkpad Edge (AMD/ATI) with 13.37 - worked fine in 13.1
 

My Thinkpad Edge (AMD/ATI version) reports in lscpi that it has a Reatlek RTL8188CE WiFi adapter (rev 01). But no wlan0 device is created at bootup, as it was under Slackware 13.1. I am using the same rc.inet1.conf file as I had with 13.1 which provides some data for wlan0 (eg WEP key).

During the boot up procedure I see eth0 being brought up and (if I have an ethernet cable connected), an IP address is assigned OK. But if there is no cable connected, under the previous set-up, an attempt was made to start up a connected on the wlan0 interface. Now there is no such interface and commands like
do not seem to do anything (first one produces error message : "wlan0: unknown interface: No such device")

I think this is a driver problem, but am not sure how to try and sort it out. On a previous Lenovo I used to sometimes manually load an iw3945 (?) driver, but that was of course different wifi hardware (intel?).

Above results seem to be the same whether I am running the huge or generic kernels.

Thanks for any ideas.

PS I removed wicd as I read in some pre-release threads that this was not considered the best wifi manager. Is there something else in 13.37 that we should be using in its place? With or without wicd seems to make no difference to the fundamental problem though.

Just marked this as solved - sorry for wasting people's time. You just need to download a driver from the Realtek site, something made clear in this thread. Even more embarassing, I must have known this as, looking at various directories on the ThinkPad I obviously did this to get the wifi working with Slackware 13.1...

Hello,
Something alike here. wifi module is rt61pci, worked in -current a month ago. When installed 13.37, card is responding but never associate with AP.
Booted with 2.6.35.11 kernel, the same config files - wifi works.
Also, rt61pci driver in 2.6.38.4 from /testing does not work.

Probably I'll compile driver backported... but it is not a priority for now.
Happy slackin'!

greetings, Alek