Mercury;

The "Alfa" part makes sense.....OTOH, your colorful adjectives are arguably in poor taste. Perhaps you could find something different.

It is most likely a wireless driver issue. I had the same issue on 13.37 recently. I simply upgraded to -current with kernel 3.2.16 and the problem disappeared. I now get stable connections.

For me the problem was similar to yours, wicd could not pick up a signal in spite of several attempts. One or two times, the network was detected, but I could not connect or connection failed very quickly. wpa_supplicant also failed to invoke correctly - I suspect this was part of the issue.

I am sure the wireless driver for your card on 2.6.37 kernel on 13.37 is problematic or wpa_supplicant doesn't get invoked with the correct parameters.

Mine is the rt2800pci driver. Do you know what driver/firmware your card uses?

Yes, wpa supplicant was even worse which is why I installed wicd since I was more familiar with it on a higher released kernel 2.x (forgot). But I do remember having problems with wicd before on a different distro. It was giving problems even with internal atheros modem as I can remember. Yes, wicd did have issues indeed. Even though I prefer the design I find NM to work better. But have not tried it on a 3.x kernel as you have.

wicd invokes wpa_supplicant internally I think for WPA encrypted connections. So wicd failure could indicate failure at a lower level.

Usually when such things happen, especially with random unstable connections or not detecting a signal, it appears to have something to do with the driver.

Sorry not to be of more use, but maybe you could get a 3.x series kernel and try again. From my own experiences, I know that the 3.x series kernels are way ahead of 2.6.x in terms of wireless support.

try to disable NetworkManager
i once tried to install and enable NetworkManager along with WICD and yes, it caused WICD to caused some problems
after i removed NetworkManager and all of it's related applications, i can have wicd working again

i think both packages are not meant to be installed on the same time, that's why wicd is placed on extra/

it may be wpa suplicant because I don't have NM installed on Slackware its on CentOS that I have it.

wpa_supplicant is not causing problems with wicd AFAIK

I use /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and a network monitor. It works very well.

I've found Wicd in use to be flawed and a bit flaky; sooner or later it'll fail with a 'bad password' message. Networkmanager's OK though.

How about including the GTK networkmanager client in Slackware?

There appears to be a Gnome panel for networkmanager but this in not in Slackware; but for those who don't want KDE there appears to be no NM GUI front-end in Slackware at the moment.

Any alternatives?

vharishankar -

Some time ago, Pat V. added the network-manager-applet program,which is the GUI frontend to NetworkManager, to -current, and all its dependencies. I am running it in XFCE with no problems. It does what I need it to do, without muss or fuss.

Hope this helps.

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As a side note, I updated slackware-current and wicd would no longer connect to wireless connections, had a go and gave bad password error. It turned out wpa_supplicant was at fault, it was missing libnl, calling wpa_supplicant directly flushed the problem out. Once that was installed all was well.

wpa_supplicant: error while loading shared libraries: libnl-3.so.200:

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I guess that may be the root of the problem.

It also could be the drivers or the firmware. There are several known drivers for wireless cards that are known to cause problems with Wicd due to things like power management, idle times, TX/RX rates, and transmitter/receiver power issues either not being supported properly or because Wicd can not handle the protocols.

For some reason the tools like NetworkManager and dhcpcd don't seem to be affected by this.