Hello,

On a clean/new installation of Slackware 14, when I connect to my Wifi router, the computer freezes and does not respond until I turn it off using the power button. It happens after it authenticates to the router, saying:

My laptop has a Realtek 8188 Wifi adapter. My wireless access point uses WPA2. I removed all my settings from /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf so is has all the default settings, though I tried it originally with these two lines added:

The only modification that I made to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf was to add

to let wpa_gui save the configuration.

I am running wpa_supplicant using the command:

I would expect an error message or at worst a silent failure if I had configured something incorrectly, but a complete freeze is a bit odd.

This problem happens whether I run startx first and try it in XFCE or just do it on the command line with no G.U.I. It's probably not a hardware problem because it worked yesterday with a LiveCD. I plan to update the whole installation once I can connect it to an Ethernet cable again, but for now, I am open to suggestions.

Thank you for your help.

By saying you are using Realtek 8188, do you mean you are using the rtlwifi family of drivers (rtl8192*)? This is likely if you just installed slackware. Do you have usb or pci? There were numerous problems with this driver set that have only recently been fixed, but aren't in the kernel for 14.1 @ version 3.10.16. For me this particular patch on the usb model made a whole lot of difference:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/ke...2833657f9221cc

I highly recommend building the latest kernel in git, as you can see reasons here in the log:
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/ke...grep&q=rtlwifi

Also there was a updated firmware that was pulled in for these chips. You can get it through the kernel-firmware.Slackbuild, but be aware the clone url has changed to (Pat needs to update it)
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git

Thanks for the reply. I might end up building a custom kernel based on a recent version, and then get a recent firmware package as well. I was trying to be lazy and just go with the basic installation and hope that I could have a normal installation by the book, but I suppose that that goes contrary to my luck.

I have a Hewlett Packard laptop that came with a Realtek 8188 card.

All I had was problems that I blamed on WICD and Network Manager.

I installed a HP compatible Atheros card and have not had any problems since.

The rtlwifi driver is of alpha quality. Just use the manufacturer's driver.