question about linux

[XcOM]

or see if you can dig up an old LindowsOS distro

i think i have one of them in my cd wallet

[PartyLikeARockstar]

Vector Linux is good too, I am surprised to not see it mentioned.

[Liquid_Scope_99]

I got DSL to work but not Xubuntu i couldnt get it to work but havent had the chance to work with it latley

[XcOM]

sometimes if your installing on limikted hardware you will need what is normally called a alternitive install cd, this isn't a live cd but will install using a very light installer, usualy annaconda

[Liquid_Scope_99]

hey thanks XcOM +rep

[Omega]

i would say earlier ubuntus are better for older hardware as they require less oomph to run, but have a harder learning curve, newer ubuntus generaly have become more automated, a bit more like windows so to speak.

I can attest to this. I'm running Kubuntu Hardy (soon to be on KDE4.1.2, too) on my laptop and if my wireless card wasn't such a strange make/model it would have been completely brainless.

[XcOM]

generally i find it easier to install NDIS wrapper and install windows drivers than try to install linux versions

[Omega]

generally i find it easier to install NDIS wrapper and install windows drivers than try to install linux versions

for sure

(unlock/add all repositories you will need first)
First find out what kind of chipset you have by doing

lspci

then install the driver, assuming you don't need to blacklist a non-working driver (like I had to with my Marvell mrv8k chip)
Then you wanna do this:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 (or whatever the utilities one is)
sudo apt-get install wicd
mkdir drivers
cd drivers
wget [driver location]
(untar only if it's a tarball... which it probably is)
tar -xvf [tarball name]
sudo ndiswrapper -i [driver.inf]
sudo ndiswrapper -m
cd ..
rm -rf ./drivers

What that does is it installs NDISwrapper, a util for installing windows wifi drivers, then you get the utils, meaning you can use ndiswrapper now, then it installs wicd, a good wifi/network manager program, mkdir drivers creates the folder /drivers under your home folder (which you operate under), wget is web get and will download a .zip or .tar file with the drivers in it, tar -xvf [tarball name] untar's or unzips your .tar or .zip, sudo ndiswrapper -i [driver.inf] installs the desired driver file as an administrator, sudo ndiswrapper -m rebuilds something or another to make it work, cd .. changes you back to your home directory and rm -rf ./driver deletes the folder /driver and all in it.

To check if your ndiswrapper install worked, type

sudo ndiswrapper -l

and it should show installed drivers and "device present"

[XcOM]

or if your using ubuntu just find ndiswrapper and common in synaptic package manager and it does it all for you and adds a new menu entry to load windows drivers, even with fedora is easy as hell, load the RPM data and the same applies

[Omega]

or if your using ubuntu just find ndiswrapper and common in synaptic package manager and it does it all for you and adds a new menu entry to load windows drivers, even with fedora is easy as hell, load the RPM data and the same applies

if you really want to you could just throw in a sudo apt-get install ndisgtk to the list of commands I wrote up, like so:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
sudo apt-get install ndisgtk
wget [driver location]
tar -xvf [tarball name]
sudo ndisgtk

then ndisgtk will pop up (graphical interface for ndiswrapper) and you tell it where the driver.inf file is, and it installs it.

i know the command line might be scary for some but it's a hell of a lot easier to sudo apt-get install things if you know what you want than it is to go into Adept or whatever your distro's package manager is. goes by so much quicker.

You also don't have to sudo before each command if you don't want to, only the first one, and you should stay logged in as sudo for 10 minutes on ubuntu distros. I sudo for each command only out of habit (older distros I used either required that you su root first or sudo before everything)