(:title "Technotalk")

Today I decided to install Slackware 13.37 into my 3 years old Dell Studio 1435. Ran into the same problem since this laptop is using a Broadcom wireless chip. Here are some of pointers to overcome this.

Beware, I’m running this as root. This post assumes you’ve installed Slackware 13.37.

Wireless

Check what kind of network chip are you using.

#lspci
#09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5784M Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10)
#0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

Head over to Slackbuilds and download the Broadcom drivers. We’re gonna use this. http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.37/network/broadcom-sta/

Install the broadcom-sta.

After installing, if you run the iwconfig command you’ll get something like this.

# iwconfig
lo         no wireless extensions.
eth0     no wireless extensions.
eth1     IEEE 802.11abg  ESSID:off/any
           Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
           Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
           Encryption key:off
           Power Management:off

Inside the installation DVD, install wicd which is part of the /extras directory.

Run wicd daemon to start wicd

# /etc/rc.d/rc.wicd start

Run Wicd Network Manager (a GUI application). In the Preferences we need to set these settings

Wireless interface : eth1

Now we can use Wicd Network Manager to connect to our wireless networks.