Final update on my wireless - WOO HOO !:

Becuase of my issue with the pcmcia card needing to be reset when I resume from standby led me to go into 2.4 kernel, load madwifi and see if that happened. On occasion it did or did not. Which led me to believe it's probably my old, and "goofy bios" or something like that.

Well I found buried on the internet a guy who has a laptop like mine. You know in the kernel compile there is an option "force old hard drives to use dma , old lost linux code" well he said to use that for better throuput on the hard drive of this pc.

So it's linux time to test and play with stuff, so I did it. Boot up, get errors that hdparm is not valid (say to myself ok hdparm is new technology take out the custom hdparm setting in rc.local) ...and then used the computer.

Later that day I put it to standby later to comeback and use the pc. And saw the card was already online! I didnt have to double click my scripts. Scratched my head and said huh? Am I crazy or is this thing working on it's own. So I put it to standy then resumed. Same thing I didnt neeed to do my scripts again.

So I guess, my hard drive wasnt working optimally, or maybe had some for of IRQ or dma issue with the new IDE code in linux, and only showed it's ugly head when I did wireless. Maybe it's just dumb luck.

Now even furthermore, I can use ndiswrapper or madwifi stable and never ever crash. I reloaded the pc to with ndis and then again madwifi. But I'm using madwifi as I want to support people writing drivers for Linux! and WILL be donating $$ to them really soon.

So that little "Y" for that line in the kernel compile actually means something to someone hahahah.

Now Final Thoughts where I cast my vote about wireless scripts in slackware:

I hope in the upcoming versions of slackware that the scripts/routine will be re-worked.

In my opinion, I believe that they should modify the rc.pcmcia scripts such that they do NOT try and initiate wireless internet connectivity at all.

The pcmcia I believe should only relate to card bus modems, or flash cards or zip drives. That's it. Because these items are normally 16 bit technology, whereas wireless cards and more modern wired network cards are 32 bit and all vendors, Madwifi, etc are writing their scripts to work with hotplug not rc.pcmia.

Hotplug should be left to take care of 32 bit devices that are not taken care of in the pcmcia schema, and the hotplug should be responsbile for the wireless.

In my mind, ideally the pc should boot like this:

Start rc.pcmcia service, then if it sees that a known installed wireless card is inserted, it then skips the rest of it's process, and says ok load hotplug now because I know hotplug is used to initiate the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 ath0 start made by Alien Bob's for hotplug/wireless schema.

It is my humble noob opinion that as of right now the rc.pcmcia see's the wireless card, and it tries to do wireless. But in a half assed fashion, only to be fighting the hotplug wireless schema.

Linux is going away from 16 bit card bus (pcmcia) in lieu of hotplug. The drivers for old rc.pcmcia are going to be re-written to work with hotplug and not pcmica at all. That said I hope slackware just moves toward that now. The madwifi works awesome! with hot plug (so long as you have pcmcia turned off in pkgtool).

I would also like to see just one file that I as a user have to input my settings into for my wireless. Right now because these two protocols BOTH look to try and do wireless, we users have to try and get 5 files to work together in unison. That's too much IMO and leads to lost time and energy spent trying to get wireless to work.

Lets get pcmcia out of the wireless routine and let Alien Bob & Madwifi make one file that takes care of everything as it talks to hotplug. Plus Bob will probably be able to get some more sleep and not answering the same questions over and over on forums if this is done.

Just my thoughts...I type to much sorry

bye for now.

Old_Fogie,

All modern so-called "PCMCIA" cards are in fact CardBus cards. What this means? They are 32-bit cards and effectively are connected to the PCI bus, but with a "PCMCIA" interface.
The rc.pcmcia (which is for the old 16-bit hardware) is not even used at all for these cards. Hotplug finds the (madwifi/ndiswrapper/rt2500/ipw2200/...etc) driven card, loads the kernel driver and calls "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 #{INTERFACE}_start". Hotplug also handles the dynamic (un)plugging of the cards, not the PCMCIA subsystem.

Hope that clears things up a little.

Eric

Please keep in mind I only have one very old laptop to base my understanding of how this all works, and that is compounded even more so by the fact that I am new and could most certainly have not followed your directions correctly or did something wrong somewhere in my setup. But I've spent weeks trying to get the pcmcia service + hotplug schema to work together in unison to no avail.

That said, the following explains why I stated that all, as when my laptop boots up with pcmcia turned on this is how things go for me:

It loads pcmcia, watches two sockets. My lights flash in an alternating pattern on my card which means it is not connected to anything. At that same point I can turn my head to my other pc which has the browser open the web-admin page of my wireless router on the "attached devices" page, and the card is not hooked up or even talking to the router. I can keep hitting refresh over and over, but the card never hooks up to the router at this point.

So in my situation, I'm very confident that at this point in my boot process, either your scripts, or the wpa supplicant are either not called for or are not running yet.

But about 1 minute later, when "hotplug loading" is echoed on my screen, your scripts and wpa supplicant do kick in, and I get hooked up and authorized to the router in about 2 seconds (I dont use DHCP that's bad for wireless security I read somewhere's).

Your scripts rock. I just think based on my experience here that the combination of hotplug/your scripts were loaded as soon as pcmcia saw that a known wireless card was inserted.

But my present solution is to have pcmcia turned off which is just fine for me. I don't need the pcmcia turned on at all for my day to day use, I boot up, get to hotplug and bang. I'm authorized before I even get to my rc.local

And if I need to use my pc-card modem I just boot up, run pkgtool and turn on pcmcia, reload and put my modem in. Problem solved.

Thanks again for the great work on the Madwifi. Donations to follow shortly I gotta speak to the wife here hahaha.

Bye for now.

Hi Old_Fogie

As I said before, I am not associated in any way with the madwifi developers. Their Madwifi Wiki allowed me to add the documentation about how to setup madwifi-driven cards in Slackware, but the wireless support in Slackware init scripts (rc.inet1 , rc.wireless) was already written by me in the period before I started using a madwifi card.
By the way, I am not affiliated with Slackware, Inc. either :-) I just create packages.

Eric

My wifi card (An old fogie one, pardon the pun), a D-Link DWL-650P1, is 16bit. rc.pcmcia fires it up, hotplug gives it brains, and Erics scripts make it usable, in that order. I need all working.

LOL. Wow a 16bit wifi card. If you ever want to sell it let me know. My friends old laptop is a p66 gateway I put slack on for him. It runs awesome and we've been trying to find one, but eveything we see is 32 bit and he cant run it. I didnt think they made 16 bit wifi cards to be honest. Well if that's the case then yeah they need to keep that in slackware for sure. Although, what will you do when the kernel stops supporting the 16bit format in rc.pcmcia. The kernel compile says it's deprecated and to be removed. Do you think that they will move your drivers over to hotplug then? I wonder this for myself as I do like using the pcmcia slot for flash memory now, and that old modem I have too now that I think of it.

Maybe I should send them an email. I think you should be. Your scripts and repeated help on this wifi issue amongst your help elsewhere on my posts, and posts your replied to for others has kept me a linux user.

I would never have been able to make it thru my transition in to linux without any of you gent's here at the forums.

The neat thing about Linux is :You don't HAVE to have the latest and greatest. If it works, why upgrade/screw it up?

Actually, I just got/installed/using a Linksys WPC54G V3 card w/ndiswrapper. Works perfect. If you really want that old card, let me know. You have my private email address