Salix Forums

My notebook has Atheros AR9285 PCI-Express wireless. It shows that the ath9k kernel driver is being used, as well as the ath9k kernel modules. wicd sees several wireless networks, but if I try to connect to an unprotected network, it fails, telling me it's unable to get an IP address. What am I doing wrong?

If you can see wireless networks your card probably is working well. Which networks do you want to connect? In rare cases there may be open networks without a DHCP server. No idea what happens to wicd then.

Just random open networks in my neighborhood as a test. There's a dlink, a netgear, I think, stuff like that. Tomorrow I'm going to bring it to work and try to get on there.

OK, these networks should work. So at first tell us more about your hardware. Do a "lspci" and perhaps a "lspci -v" (of the relevant section).
If this is a newc chipset the Slackware kernel might be too old.

Yep. It works.

So what was the problem?