Love the way you're keeping up on this, Fogie. Most would have given up after hearing the squishy sounds that your head is making after hitting the wall so many times...lol

Keep going, you'll get it.

LOL yeah I'm a glutton for punishment I guess.

You know, I would not go thru this if I could not see the benefit of Linux; and of course the speedy help and feedback from everyone here.

I tell ya, Linux runs so nice on this old laptop. I get into X now in under 1 minute from boot up. Takes like 8 seconds to load the browser.

And in 1-2 months, you'll still be faster, load faster, and not have a bit of spyware/adware/virus.

And if you did, YOU know your inner fiddly bits better than any (including me!) Windows Guru could dream of.

Plus, you can, and are, helping others thru this post and answers you'll be giving soon to other people 'on their last rope'

Pay it forward.

WOO HOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, 10 reboots so far and everytime I get into X and I'm wpa-psk via TKIP. No typing anything!

I'll post back in little while with what I did.

Yep! I'm rockin!

I'm gonna write my "how I did it" and post it as I've yet to find a slackware ndiswrapper 2.6 version kernel with wpa_supplicant post yet.

I'm still trying to figure out why this /etc/rc.d/rc.m is delaying me on bootup.

Can I simply delete rc.wireless and rc.wireless.sh?

I've followed the instructions on ndiswrapper's site, and they have us do nothing with these files.

Yet they are queed on boot-up. Sure those two files have fields you can fill it that claim to call the ndiswrapper into play, but they simply dont work for me. "PS AX" never shows the wpa supplicant running. In fact, they change my essid to be nothing which messes me up even more when I put something into those files, in addition to the 1 minute delay they give before hotplug starts.

Now I downloaded the newer versions. Overwrote the empty one's and had same issue.

Then I filled in the fields in rc.wireless.conf and rc.wireless.sh and still no difference. They never call the wpa_supplicant into play.

I do have this /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf properly configured. As I do get a connection before I log on to X if and only if I put these commands into /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper #loads ndiswrapper
ifconfig wlan0 up #brings up wlan0
/usr/local/bin/wpa_supplicant -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Bw #tells the supplicant to alywas run in the background
/sbin/dhcpcd wlan0 # get's me the IP from my router.

deleted, ndiswrapper too unstable.

Well in summary, after 5 days and about 4 freezes I'm not satisfied overall. My pc is either too slow, or I need to switch to Fedora Core as they allow 12K or 16K stacks. I think that the stack size is the issue here.

I've compiled the kernel to use 8k stacks, no advanced power management, no ACPI, no pre-emptive kernel.

The freezes are sporadic, you don't know when they are going to come, but it appears that when you do alot of data transfer like moving 100 meg files over your lan-network they freeze.

I took off the encryption and just used open, same thing. Turned down the speed, same thing. I tried ALL ndiswrapper's greater that 1.1 and no luck. Even this weeks latest 1.3 version which goes in really well. I was concerned maybe it was an encryption thing, but no.

That's the only reason I don't wish to use ndiswrapper: A windows driver on a Linux system. The various non-published hooks, etc. can cause freezes, lockups, sporadic behavior. My next wireless card I will research before I buy to make sure there is some kind of non=ndiswrapper soluyion for the driver issue.

Research my hard ware before I buy, very true. I still have to run windows here for my microtek scanner and my cannon printer

Well I loaded in Madwifi, and I've done about 50 reboots and used this pc w/the Madwifi exclusively for hours on end. Not one crash, or freeze up yet. I found a tweak on the net to madwifi drivers to bump up my range so I'm good throughout my whole entire house now. That was the issue that led me to try out ndiswrapper if you recall.

I've got my essid turned off, and this card hooks up every time (a feature that the madwifi site said is hard to do) woo hoo I must be lucky.

I couldnt get the 2.6.15.3 drivers package or the wpa_supplicant package that madwifi put togethter to install on the 2.6.15.3 custom kernel I made. I could get them in on 2.4.31 and the testing kernel/2.6.13 of slack. I did the make your own madwifi and wpa drivers. Took some time as this pc is slow. But it all works like a charm.

I'm just trying to figure out why pc is slow at boot with "pcmcia turned on" for boot. I suspect pcmcia kicks in part of the madwifi and then we get to hotplug and it tries again and causes a little of a delay. Turning off pcmcia boot up is much faster. I'd like to keep pcmcia as I have a modem that I can put in there to fax out if need be, and also for camera memory.

Hi Old_Fogie,

Those Slackware packages are not created by madwifi site admins or developers. As the URL http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/Distro/Slackware shows, this is user-contributed documentation. I wrote the bulk of that and I made the packages. If you have questions about either packages or docs, there is no point in contacting madwifi developers, because they are not using Slackware themselves.

Eric

oh ok thank you for letting me know. I was not certain (as I'm still new) if maybe I had possibly not configured my kernel correctly.

I have an "issue" restoring internet with the madwifi wireless after I come back from 'standby' wondering if you guys might shed some light for me.

Is there any tweaks for this with power management I'm not aware of? and should I have pcmcia on or off. What's better for the madwifi's.

oh I got it now!

If i want to go standby I have to do the following:
1. wpa_cli terminate
2. /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia stop (using /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 ath0_stop wipes out my Essid in ath0

enter standby...now asleep.

hit space bar to resume...once back in KDE

1. /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmica start
2. /etc/rc.d/rc.rc.inet1 ath0_restart (using ath0_start wipes out my ESSID in ath0

the wpa_gui seems to be good for me to turn off the card to save power but while still using the computer.

this old pc is not the most apm/acpi compliant it's very old, but thought the above might be informative.

now to work on my scripts and sudo commands for above commands for normal user .i.e. me

Also may think about where to put that as a script.... Could come in handy to just type one command instead of many more.