Thank you for your help, everyone.

/etc/modprobe.conf was a mess. The SL 5.3 updates kept the old "alias wlan0 iwl4965" line I used to make the wireless work back in 5.1, but it also added "alias wmaster0 iwlagn" and a bunch of lines regarding the sound card:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=0
remove snd-hda-intel { /usr/sbin/alsactl store 0 >/dev/null 2>&1 || : ; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove snd-hda-intel

I have no idea what it was trying to do here, but the end result was that I had no sound whatsoever (not just in skype). I got rid of all this and now I at least have sound (though for some reason, the microphone is quiet to the point of being almost inaudible regardless of what I set the volume to).

The firefox crash was indeed caused by the flash player -- I disabled the flash plugin and the skype page ( http://www.skype.com/intl/en/welcomeback/ ), which crashed 100% of the time, now loads properly. Unfortunately, installing curl doesn't help; I now have both curl.i386 and curl.x86_64 installed and enabling the plugin still causes the crash.

The only problem left is that the wireless is still grayed out. I tried "yum install iwl\*" and it installed the microcode for the 3945 and 5100 cards (in addition to the 4965 microcode which was already installed), but this didn't fix the problem. My /etc/modprobe.conf now contains only these three lines:

alias wlan0 iwlagn
options iwlagn swcrypto50=1 swcrypto=1
alias scsi_hostadapter ahci

The first two I got from the SL5.3 release notes and the third one was put there by the SL 5.3 update. With this configuration, the SIOCSIFFLAGS nuisance is gone, but I still don't have wireless. Also, neither with the default package nor the one from RPMforge is there any microcode in /etc/firmware (it's all in /lib/firmware ) -- I've tried creating a link, but it doesn't help.

-- Aram


-----Original Message-----
From: Niels Walet [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thu 4/23/2009 3:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]; Avetisyan, Aram
Subject: Re: Updating to SL 5.3 issues
 
Crashes to firefox:
One reason can be the version of flash-I have had serios problems with th
at,
especially if curl is not installed (yum install curl.i386): what is the
list of plugins? (i.e., browse to about:plugins)
Also, it looks like there may be issues with your soundcard driver; you s
ay
it fails in skype, that may be an indication of extra problems. You may w
ant
to check the soundcard setup first.
Niels