Hi! It won't help much, but I'll tell it anyway since this thread is familiar to me.

I started in Slackware back in 2010, never had installed a OS different from Windows in my life and never used Linux either. A friend of mine had been using Slackware since 2000 and told he would help me with any problems, so... Best decision in my life I ever made, learned so much just installing the system...

My notebook was a Dell Inspiron and had a broadcom card too (bcm4313). Back in the day the kernel still didn't have it builtin, so I resorted to broadcom-sta, and it worked, but had to remember to rebuild it every time I updated the kernel. But since the kernel included support for it with brcmsmac I never had any problem.

Well, my point is, I had problems with Slackware because of drivers and such, all of them was because of my lack of knowledge. But I enjoyed the ride learning and exploring the inner workings of the system. After this I can go to any distro and know what it is doing, and any problem at all is easy to figure out. Slackware makes this by being such a rock solid distro, that 99.9% of the problems you encounter on the way must have been you that did something wrong, so it is so much easier to backtrack and learn.

Trying to help:
In the arch wiki
Don't know if rworkman b43-firmware from slackbuilds is the classic version....

2 members found this post helpful.

After some thought, I performed the following after logging in as root:This turns on the WiFi indicator light on my Dell Latitude.
When I go into Network Manager after these actions, it recognizes
my Wifi ESSID and gives me a green check mark for my security recognition.
Network Manager pauses when I click my ESSID and the KDE wallet prompts
me for my (non wifi) password. At least I assume this is the non wifi password.
It then tries to address and configure my wlan0, which fails and reads
"not connected". One step closer to figuring out the wifi I suppose.

For anyone who is still hanging around, thank you.

Try your wifi password and see what happens

1 members found this post helpful.

I imagine there's a way to prioritize which module would load over the other, but my google-fu skills are lacking tonight... but you should be able to blacklist the wl module, which will hopefully mean that the b43 module should be selected automatically. Just add blacklist wl to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to have it blacklisted.

If you haven't already, try switching the default dhcp client for Network Manager from dhcpcd to dhclient. You can do this under /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/00-dhcp-client.conf. Just comment out the dhcpcd line and uncomment the dhclient line. If you did already do that, try swapping it.

1 members found this post helpful.

What if that path doesn't exist?
When I altered this last time, I had to insert the dhcp = dhclient line myself into the file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

At the time of my alteration, the only items present were:
I have altered it so that it now reads:
Is this erroneous? Should I have a conf.d directory?
Quite confusing.

Additionally my /NetworkManager directory contains a /systemconnections directory which has a file by the name of my wifi ssid.
I don't really know what's going on in there.

-CD

Oops, I forgot you were still on 14.1. That conf.d folder is a new thing for 14.2. A default NetworkManager.conf should contain the below (with the hostname matching your computer's name):

I'm not sure why your initial one didn't contain the dhcp line. But with making this change, have you had any better luck connecting to your wireless network?

I always forget to select security (wpa 1/2 etc.) and the pre-shared key (psk), in the lower right hand corner of the network manager dialog box. if fwcutter, the firmware, wicd, and network manager are installed, and ifconfig -a shows wlan0, then you should be able to connect without blacklisting anything, or editing any config files wpa_supplicant included, unless you need to for some reason other than connecting to the internet. Not sure if 14.1 handles this so easily because I do remember blacklisting several modules a long time ago. we don't have to do that in later slackware releases

I have found a temporary way to solve my problem.
By using my friend's unused 802.11 b/g WiFi card, I am able to connect to my network using network manager.
I have not been able to ascertain the direct problem with my 4311 chipset wlan0 interface.
Instead I use the aforementioned WiFi card as a work-around for now.
Without the card, the same problem still exists. Network Manager still tries to configure the original card, but fails each time. Should I mark this thread as solved? I do not feel as though the problem has been solved, as much as it has been avoided.

I'd like to thank everyone who stuck around.
I have performed all of the ideas in this thread with the exception of the last one at this point.

Any other comments or ideas?

-CD