Need alot of wireless help

[amplitude]

Alright so let me begin by saying I'm a complete noob at linux and I have no idea where to begin. I will list what I have done incase it could help anybody who can help me.

It took me a while, but I have installed slackware 13 on my Sony Vaio VGN-FS760/W Notebok. I installed all the packages that come with the installation except for the extra language pack (Total a 5.7G installation).

I partitioned my drive half for / and half for /home and I have created a user and am now running xfce under that and not my root. I startx and the nice interface comes up and I'm ready to go. The problem is there is no internet, I'm pretty sure some drivers are missing, and I would like to learn how to customize my interface to something else, the problem for me is understanding all these web guides. I searched for 5 hours everywhere on how to do this stuff at my work (Not where my notebook is) trying to retain all the information i possibly could. I'm now here and no matter what I read today I can't seem to get anything working, so I've decided to ask this wonderful community.

What I'm asking for is help on:
How to get my wireless set up
How to get all my drivers installed
How to change the main theme

AND all of this in english. I'm a quick learner, but I cannot self teach myself, I just need a push.


Wireless card info that I have obtained:
Original - Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection Driver

I believe this is where I should start but I just don't know what to do.

I ave searched the forums and found waterheads thread about posting the information your looking for, but when I type his commands in the terminal it tells me the command is not found,

Thanks in advance.

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome.
You probably just need to issue those commands as the root user or use sudo, it depends on how your system is set up.
When you login as root, be sure to include the hyphen like so

su -

(password)
Press enter. If you are still getting "command not found" then that might mean you need to install the package that supplies the needed commands. I'm not too familiar with Slack so hopefully someone else can chime in here.

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

With Slack, commands like lspci and the like aren't in the normal users executable path.
You can do as Mike suggested (login as root), or you can enter them with the direct path: /sbin/lspci, /sbin/lsusb, /sbin/ifconfig.

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums!

It may be good to know why you installed Slackware. Because Slackware isn't a newbie friendly distro. And howto's about it's configuration wont feature left-clicks or right-clicks, as Slackware doesn't ship with many GUI tools. If you want something easy that is up and running Real Quick without effort, then you may want to reconsider.

If you want to run an advanced and very flexible and reliable system that is configured manually, then by all means go ahead. Slackware is a good choice. Just realize there is a learning curve. You'll really learn the Linux system, and the power and flexibility it has in the process. But you'll also find things that you considered 'easy' in a well known proprietary operating system are handled differently. The biggest challenge is to unlearn all you think you know about computers

___
For example, let's look at these drivers. The driver system in Linux is just incomparable to how Windows handles it. In Windows, you go to the site of the hardware manufacturer to download the driver. In Linux, the drivers are handled inside the kernel. I've checked, and you'll need the ipw2200 driver for your wireless. This driver is included by default.

So chances are very good that you need to do nothing but configure your card. Let's look at your interfaces.

As root:

ifconfig -a

You'll see a couple of interfaces. One will be called 'lo', this is your loopback interface (you know the saying: there's no place like 127.0.0.1 ) and probably an interface called 'eth0', which is your wired interface. Your wireless card can have different names, mine is wlan0.

Bring up the interface:

ifconfig wlan0 up

Look for networks:

iwlist scan

Does this work?

Then, assuming that you disabled encryption for debugging purposes (once it all works, you'll turn it back on of course)

iwconfig wlan0 essid your_essid

Of course, doing it like this means you'll have to do this every time you boot your machine. There's ways to automate this, so you never have to do it again. But first lets see if it works.

[amplitude]

Alright I have done everything you indicated to do, I now understand that "lo" is my system and eth0 is my wired connection. My wireless appears to be eth1 as I inputted

ifconfig eth1 up

followed by

iwlist scan

and a group of networks appeared.

After I inputted

iwconfig eth1 essid default

Nothing happened.

Whats next? :O

EDIT: I just tried random tihngs to set up the wired connection and that works, now for the wireless :O

[jayd512]

After doing

iwconfig eth1 essid default

(assuming 'default' is your network name)

was there any output at all? Errors?
If not, then all went as planned.
After inputting that command, do:

ifconfig eth1

Provided you have an IP address, then you should have internet connectivity.

[amplitude]

I have retyped in ifconfig eth1 and this is what coes up:

bash-4.1# iwconfig eth1 essid default
bash-4.1# ifconfig eth1
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:13:ce:44:19:ca
inet6 addr: fe80::213:ceff:fe44:19ca/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:6 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:432 (432.0 B)
Interrupt:22 Base address:0xe000 Memory:b0006000-b0006fff

bash-4.1# ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:01:4a:c2:aa:dd
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

The internet no longer works wired, and doesn't work with my wireless.

[MikeTbob]

Is the name of your network Default? You must supply the correct essid name. After you connect as above, did you run dhcp? or dhclient eth1?

[amplitude]

bash-4.1# iwconfig eth1
eth1 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"default" Nickname:"Tarantula"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:80:C8:0C:53:42
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=8/0
Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=92/100 Signal level=-36 dBm Noise level=-82 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:138 Missed beacon:1

Thats what i get after i type in iwconfig eth1 and its a lowercase d.

And no what is dhcp or dhclient?


EDIT: omg it works, THANK YOU <3 I just typed in dhclient and opened a window and there it was :O! but how do i make it automatic now?

[MikeTbob]

bash-4.1# iwconfig eth1
eth1 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"default" Nickname:"Tarantula"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:80:C8:0C:53:42
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=8/0
Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=92/100 Signal level=-36 dBm Noise level=-82 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:138 Missed beacon:1

Thats what i get after i type in iwconfig eth1 and its a lowercase d.

And no what is dhcp or dhclient?


EDIT: omg it works, THANK YOU <3 I just typed in dhclient and opened a window and there it was :O! but how do i make it automatic now?

Glad you got it working, I would suggest that you wait on someone else to answer your last question, I don't know where Slack keeps it's net config files.