I downloaded the original Ralink rt2500 driver for my wireless device, and after a manual install and a bit of a fight (iwconfig didn't seem to work), I am able to read and post messages on this forum,

But, sometimes on boot my machine freezes, usually on a message about broadcasting and dhcp.

So, after reading the other rt2500 post on this forum, I downloaded Alien Bob's improved driver. However, this results in a crash or
freeze everytime, sometimes on modprobe rt2500, sometimes on ifconfig ra0 up.

So I'm back to the original driver and infrequent freezes on boot.

Any ideas? Thanks.

I always use the rt2x00 driver from www.serialmonkey.com

Never have an issue with it.

BTW, if you have /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf properly edited, you need do nothing else, just run (EX
That will connect you, run dhcp, whatever...

Thanks for the tip about ra0_restart.

I've tried the serial monkey rt2500 driver but it completely crashes my
system on modprobe rt2500.

I've spent a lot of time browsing the web, reading howtos, building kernels etc. but
I can't quite get slack linux to work as smoothly as I'd like.

I have a vague suspicion that including acpi support makes my kernel unstable.
Using bareacpi.i causes a complete freeze on boot up. I compiled a kernel
with acpi support and that gives me ac/battery info
(will check out the resume/hibernate howto link in your sig) but I suspect
it makes my system unstable in other ways - perhaps explaining my rt2500 issue.
I need to experiment further to be sure of this though.

Here's an update to my rt2500 problem which is now 99% fixed, but it has thrown up some puzzling
questions.

I was using the 2.4.33.3 kernel on slackware 11 when I posted the above. After doing a bit of
reading on the web I decided that going to the 2.6 kernel might help with wireless and acpi problems.

Ironically, when compiling the 2.6.17.13 kernel my machine froze completely - the first freeze that I've had
that wasn't obviously associated with the rt2500 driver. After a reboot and some driving fixing, I recompiled the kernel again and booted up into 2.6. I've not had a freeze since.

I compiled the rt2500 driver from serial monkey (exactly the same source as I used in 2.4).
I put my wireless details in the config file /etc/Wireless/RT2500STA/RT2500STA.dat
and then got it working with the following:

modprobe rt2500
ifconfig ra0 up
dhcpcd ra0

Note: iwconfig didn't work; it only told me that ra0 had no wireless extensions. iwlist ra0 scan
told me that the card didn't support scanning. [Under the 2.4 kernel, iwlist worked fine and iwconfig at least recognised ra0 as a wireless device but failed to configure the wpa-psk tkip encryption I'm using.]

So now, not only do I have no freezes but dhcpcd now works much faster. The only thing that appears to be different is that my web browsers (konqueror, seamonkey and firefox) all seem to spend many seconds
"looking up" website urls, even though nslookup works very fast. Irritating, but better than system freezes.