Very paranoid question about slackware and internet connection
 

I've just bought a notebook to write on, but it doesnt have one of the manual off/on switches for wireless internet that bigger laptops have. The notebook wireless on/off is sofware controlled within XP.

I just wanted to ask..

On a default install, slack doesnt attempt to connect to the net at all does it?

A user would have to set wi-fi internet access up manually himself?

I think I know the answer to the question, but Im being ultra-paranoid.

As long as you don't setup the network either during installation or afterwards, Slackware will not try to connect to anywhere.

No, it doesn't attempt to connect to the internet wirelessly. In fact, it is quite difficult to make it do so without wicd (which is in /extra and would need to be installed by you after the main install). There is rc.wireless but it is not configured to connect to anything by default and you can also make it not run during install.

What H_TeXMeX_H said. If you use wicd you have to specifically tell it that you want to be auto-connected and you have to do it for every network individually.

Slackware comes with tcpdump.

The following will monitor traffic on wlan0:

You can refine this further by filtering out ports, addresses, protocols and more.

Oh, and my netbook has a BIOS option to turn off the wifi card and bluetooth. I have turned these off, because I don't need bluetooth and it is a vulnerability and because the onboard wifi is bad and crashes often on any OS.

Thanks a lot guys, you've made a very paranoid man, less paranoid :D

Really, thanks.

now dig in the thread about firewall to become paranoid again :P

You could experiment with 'rfkill' to see if the wireless device can be enabled and disabled.