Back to Slack? Part 2

I got the dual booting to work finally, as well as the wireless. For the dual boot, I reinstalled the Windows 7 bootloader as I said last time, then used easyBCD to add an entry for Linux. Finally I booted Slack up using my install DVD and ran liloconfig, this time installing lilo locally rather than to the MBR. Windows 7 boot loader now lets me chainload into lilo.

As for the wireless, an lspci gives,

0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

The B43 module loads fine, but to make it work you need to grab the firmware from here: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43. The instructions are,

wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-012.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-012.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-012
make
cd ..
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-012/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta_mimo.o

Simple enough. According to that page, the firmware can’t be distributed due to copyrighting. Oddly though, this all works just fine in Ubuntu or Backtrack right after the install…

As for the actual wireless configuration, Slackware 13 still doesn’t have a decent GUI configuration utility for wireless. For WPA, the easiest way is to just edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local and add,

iwconfig wlan0 essid “Your ESSID”
wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &
dhcpcd wlan0

Then go and edit /etc/wpa_supplicant and make sure it looks something like,

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=0
fast_reauth=1

# WPA protected network, supply your own ESSID and WPAPSK here:
network={
scan_ssid=1
ssid=”Your ESSID”
proto=WPA RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk=”Your WPA Pass Phrase”
priority=10
}

Make sure for both the ESSID and Pass Phrase you include the quotes. The only problem left is that in dmesg I keep seeing,

b43-phy0 ERROR: PHY transmission error

This isn’t new though, I had the same error all the time with Ubuntu. My home connection seems to work fine, but some access points I’ve gotten random dropping of the connection and the above error. Considering I don’t take this laptop anywhere much now that I have my netbook, I’m not too worried about it right now.

Now to go configure Slackware the way I like it. So far, even this is being difficult…

root@vostro:/home/pherricoxide# xorgsetup
Only root can configure X.
root@vostro:/home/pherricoxide# whoami
root

Back to Slack?

Well, after hearing and seeing horrible things with the new Ubuntu release, I decided to try good old stable Slackware on my new 320GB drive along side Windows 7. The install was… well, you know how Linux goes.

First off, LILO refused to boot into Windows 7. When I tried to edit the lilo.conf and then run lilo -v to update it, I got the error, Fatal Error: Partition entry not found. The partition from which an other operating system should be booted isn’t listed in the specified partition table. The only thing I could find online said,

This either means that an incorrect partition table has been specified or that you’re trying to boot from a logical partition. The latter usually doesn’t work. – Linux Bible

Well, I am trying to boot Windows from a logical partition. Why doesn’t this work? Don’t know….

I put my Windows 7 install disk in, restored the MBR with “bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr” inside the repair command prompt. Will update this when I have some more time to make it work. I’ll try and just install Lilo/Grub to the same partition as Slackware’s on and then point the Windows 7 bootloader to it. Either that or I’ll try Grub instead of Lilo.