I have a flaky wireless configuration. Most of the time it works, but lately I've had to bring it up manually a few times.

At boot time I can tell whether it will work or not depending on the messages I see on the screen. If I something to the effect of "any ESSID" or "set nickname failed", I know it won't be working and I'll have to start it manually. If it will work, I don't think I see any reference to the wireless at all.

Any idea what is going on here.

I have other issue on my wife's lappy. On hers, there appear to be 2 instances of wpa_supplicant starting, though I can't see where from. My best guess is that these two instances stop the wifi from playing nicely, and the network connection doesn't work (though it can grab an IP address at boot time). If I kill both processes and start manually, I can get it configured OK. I also appeared to have a situation where wpa_supplicant would only associate if brought up in verbose mode (though I may well have imagined that, it was late and I was tired).

Any thought here too.

The difficulty I have is that I'm unfamiliar with the configuration process, and I don (yet) understand the scripting in the rc.* files. Some explanation of what is going on would be appreciated as it may help me to track the problem down if noone else had any idea what is going here.

Thanks all.

R

Read Alien Bob's Installing Madwifi on Slackware.

You are leaving out a lot of necessary information to help you.
You only need to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf properly to use
wireless in Slackware-12.0 and 12.1. I've done this on a number
of comps and it works fine.

If you can't get it fixed reading that, then start by posting what
you have done to which files, as well as the contents of the files
that you've edited. All I do for Atheros chipset cards is install
Alien Bob's madwifi package, then setup /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf per
his tutorial, and restart the services or reboot the laptop.