wicd not working on 14.0

[max_arbit]

Hi,

I am new to Salix. Just installed it now on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. Everything seems to work great, except for wi-fi. I have no clue what the problem could. I have installed slackware 14.0 on this laptop and on that, everything including the wi-fi just worked out of the box.

Not sure what went wrong, nor do I know enough to debug it myself.

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# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"junkies"  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=0 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:on
          
eth0      no wireless extensions.

Not sure if that means anything about my wireless card being identified or not. The wi-fi light on my laptop is not on, so most likely it is not detected.

Have no idea how to proceed with this. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[mimosa]

Is that output from your laptop, or from the Dell? I'm a bit confused by your post because you say that everything including wifi works on the laptop, but the wifi light isn't on, so you think the card isn't detected. But if it works, it is detected, whatever the light says.

EDIT Ah, I see that the Dell is a laptop too. Makes more sense now.

Assuming the problem is just with the Dell, what do you see from Wicd? Can it see the "junkies" network? Where exactly does connecting come unstuck, in comparison to the laptop with Slackware?

The output you post means that both network and (therefore) card have been detected. It only remains to connect to the network. That can be done from the command line, but I'd suggest first trying to coax Wicd into doing its stuff, which it normally does very smoothly.

Please post more details.

[max_arbit]

Thanks a lot for the reply.

Actually, it can't see any wireless networks. In fact, the wi-fi light on my laptop, which is on if my wi-fi is working correctly is not on. This gives me a feeling that the wi-fi card is yet to be detected. How do I see if it is detected or not?

To answer your question about WICD, when I open WICD, it doesn't show up anything related wireless and just states that no wireless networks are found. My network is not hidden, so it should have just popped up.

I did wire up the LAN cable that just works perfectly fine! I remember that on my slackware, till I was on 13.37 I used to install some additional drivers bc43... and it used to work. However, for slackware 14.0, it just worked out of the box and since it seems like slax is based off of 14.0 too, I expected the same thing to happen. Strangely, it doesn't.

EDIT:

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# ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory

Turns out this was the error I should have googled. A simple google of this gave me a link to one other question on this forum itself and as it turns out, somebody had the exact same problem. As per the suggestion, I had to install b43-fwcutter and b43-firmware from slackbuilds.org and boom, it just works! All I had to do was search for the right string!

I still wonder why this "driver" was not included in Salix whereas it was part of Slackware. Probably, because mine is just a too old laptop
Thanks for the help though. Hopefully, my experience with Salix will be just as smooth!

[mimosa]

Glad you got it working