(Vanity)Linux and Wireless Networks Help/Advice sought(Vanity)

me | 10/30/2005 | me

[birbear]

I just inherited a Dell Inspiron 2500 notebook (Pentium 3, 700mhz, 192megs of RAM).

It's currently running WinXP Home, but it's dog-slow. I'm thinking of throwing some type of Linux on it, rather than reinstalling XP, just so I have a Linux machine to learn on and play with.

My question is about wireless networks. I just threw a Linksys wireless card in the slot thingy (PCMCIA?) and it found my home network just fine. Will I have any problems with this hardware if I switch to Linux?

Thanks a lot!

Bir

[AmericaUnited]

Don't go the Linux route! Just add another 256MB of memory and your problems will go away. This ram is cheap! ~$50

Also, consider not loading all of the services and extraneous junk that comes standard with WindowsXP.

[birbear]

Don't go the Linux route! Just add another 256MB of memory and your problems will go away. This ram is cheap! ~$50

Yeah, but that sounds like the sucker's way out. As somebody else posted, "learning can be fun."

[FLAMING DEATH]

This card reportedly works out-of-the-box with SimplyMepis 3.3... http://www.mepis.org/node/5624

If you're making the switch from Windows, you can save yourself a lot of time and troble by getting Mepis. For a full featured distro, it's really user friendly. I'm running version 2004 right now on this ancient laptop of mine, had it for over a year and am very satisfied with it.

[Codename - Ron Benjamin]

I don't know the exact details for the Inspiron, but SDRAM for a Pentium 3 is a bit hard to obtain lately.

[Halfmanhalfamazing]

Your card AFAIK uses broadcom hardware, which isn't supported.

I'd recommend a distro which comes "out of the box" with NDISwrapper, which enables windows drivers to work on linux.

To my knowledge, Ubuntu comes with NDIS in it, as well as Suse.