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From: john on 29 May 2010 10:26
I have version 13.0. I use XFCE. The release announcement for 13.1
mentions XFCE ahead of KDE 4, a useful hint for those not prepared for
the cryptic and sluggish KDE4.

What I am hoping to see on Slack is an automatic and foolproof
wireless connection equivalent to the one I found on Knoppix. Using
13.0 I did a lot of extra work to get wireless working on the family
laptop, and after a while it stopped working. OTOH Knoppix has a
wireless connection without difficulty and without extra effort. So I
installed Knoppix on the hard drive instead. Works fine.

Slackware needs to have a more foolproof and reliable wireless hookup.
It should be a standard feature and not an add-on. Laptops are
increasingly the computer of choice for many. The 13.1 release
announcement does not mention wireless connection upgrades.

I'll upgrade XFCE separately since that is the interface I use.

John Culleton
From: Chris Sorenson on 29 May 2010 16:57
john(a)wexfordpress.com wrote:
> I have version 13.0. I use XFCE. The release announcement for 13.1
> mentions XFCE ahead of KDE 4, a useful hint for those not prepared for
> the cryptic and sluggish KDE4.
>
> What I am hoping to see on Slack is an automatic and foolproof
> wireless connection equivalent to the one I found on Knoppix. Using
> 13.0 I did a lot of extra work to get wireless working on the family
> laptop, and after a while it stopped working. OTOH Knoppix has a
> wireless connection without difficulty and without extra effort. So I
> installed Knoppix on the hard drive instead. Works fine.
>
> Slackware needs to have a more foolproof and reliable wireless hookup.
> It should be a standard feature and not an add-on. Laptops are
> increasingly the computer of choice for many. The 13.1 release
> announcement does not mention wireless connection upgrades.
>
> I'll upgrade XFCE separately since that is the interface I use.
>
> John Culleton

Distros that have foolproof-automatic wireless support have technical
staffs that are way bigger than Slackware. As far as I can tell the
wireless support that Slackware does have was implemented mostly by
Eric Hameleers.

It took me a couple days to get my Broadcom card working, I had to get
the firmware, get the firmware cutter, add kernel support, make edits
to wireless-supplicant.conf (which mysteriously disappeared in 12.2,
possibly replaced by wpa_supplicant.conf, can't remember, shoulda wrote
it down!), also edits to rc.inet1.conf and rc.wireless.conf, had to
create a 90-local.rules files in /etc/udev/rules.d and add
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*",
ATTR{address}=="00:17:3f:87:09:9c", ATTR{type}=1, NAME="wlan0" to it
(using, of course, the MAC address of my specific card), had to
figure out how to start dhcpd on the wireless interface, a whole
bunch more stuff that I also should have written down, but in the end
it all suddenly started working. There's no way Pat has time to do
that for the vast array of wireless hardware out there...
From: Grant on 29 May 2010 19:20
On Sat, 29 May 2010 15:57:13 -0500, Chris Sorenson <csoren(a)isd.net> wrote:

>john(a)wexfordpress.com wrote:
>> I have version 13.0. I use XFCE. The release announcement for 13.1
>> mentions XFCE ahead of KDE 4, a useful hint for those not prepared for
>> the cryptic and sluggish KDE4.
>>
>> What I am hoping to see on Slack is an automatic and foolproof
>> wireless connection equivalent to the one I found on Knoppix. Using
>> 13.0 I did a lot of extra work to get wireless working on the family
>> laptop, and after a while it stopped working. OTOH Knoppix has a
>> wireless connection without difficulty and without extra effort. So I
>> installed Knoppix on the hard drive instead. Works fine.
>>
>> Slackware needs to have a more foolproof and reliable wireless hookup.
>> It should be a standard feature and not an add-on. Laptops are
>> increasingly the computer of choice for many. The 13.1 release
>> announcement does not mention wireless connection upgrades.
>>
>> I'll upgrade XFCE separately since that is the interface I use.
>>
>> John Culleton
>
>Distros that have foolproof-automatic wireless support have technical
>staffs that are way bigger than Slackware. As far as I can tell the
>wireless support that Slackware does have was implemented mostly by
>Eric Hameleers.
>
>It took me a couple days to get my Broadcom card working, I had to get
>the firmware, get the firmware cutter, add kernel support, make edits
>to wireless-supplicant.conf (which mysteriously disappeared in 12.2,
>possibly replaced by wpa_supplicant.conf, can't remember, shoulda wrote
>it down!), also edits to rc.inet1.conf and rc.wireless.conf, had to
>create a 90-local.rules files in /etc/udev/rules.d and add
>SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*",
>ATTR{address}=="00:17:3f:87:09:9c", ATTR{type}=1, NAME="wlan0" to it
>(using, of course, the MAC address of my specific card), had to
>figure out how to start dhcpd on the wireless interface, a whole
>bunch more stuff that I also should have written down, but in the end
>it all suddenly started working. There's no way Pat has time to do
>that for the vast array of wireless hardware out there...

It's all open source, so one could examine how Knoppix goes about wireless
stuff and 'fix' Slackware? I can't do that as I'm not using wireless here.

Grant.
--
http://bugs.id.au/
From: Henrik Carlqvist on 30 May 2010 05:49
"john(a)wexfordpress.com" <john(a)wexfordpress.com> wrote:
> What I am hoping to see on Slack is an automatic and foolproof
> wireless connection equivalent to the one I found on Knoppix. Using
> 13.0 I did a lot of extra work to get wireless working on the family
> laptop,

The quick and easy way to get wireless and wired network working on a
laptop is to install the wicd package included in the extra directory.

regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc3(at)poolhem.se Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
root(a)localhost postmaster(a)localhost

From: Chris Vine on 30 May 2010 06:13
On Sat, 29 May 2010 07:26:54 -0700 (PDT)
"john(a)wexfordpress.com" <john(a)wexfordpress.com> wrote:
> I have version 13.0. I use XFCE. The release announcement for 13.1
> mentions XFCE ahead of KDE 4, a useful hint for those not prepared for
> the cryptic and sluggish KDE4.
>
> What I am hoping to see on Slack is an automatic and foolproof
> wireless connection equivalent to the one I found on Knoppix. Using
> 13.0 I did a lot of extra work to get wireless working on the family
> laptop, and after a while it stopped working. OTOH Knoppix has a
> wireless connection without difficulty and without extra effort. So I
> installed Knoppix on the hard drive instead. Works fine.
>
> Slackware needs to have a more foolproof and reliable wireless hookup.
> It should be a standard feature and not an add-on. Laptops are
> increasingly the computer of choice for many. The 13.1 release
> announcement does not mention wireless connection upgrades.
>
> I'll upgrade XFCE separately since that is the interface I use.

The extras directory has wicd in it. That makes setting up wireless
relatively trivial (similar to the graphical interfaces used by other
operating systems we shall not mention). You should make yourself a
member of the netdev group.

Chris


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