Linux, laptops, and wireless-G networking

Discussion in 'Technology' started by Foosinho, Oct 30, 2004.

  1. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    So, I just bought this refurb Dell Latitude laptop, and installed RedHat 9. I have a LinkSys WPC54G ver.2 wireless network card I'm trying to install, and without much success. I managed to download ndiswrapper and compile that tool, but when I try to load the module I'm getting undefined symbol errors, which would seem to imply my kernel is too old. :(

    Should I try to update my kernel? Does anyone know of a better method of setting up the drivers (or a better source) for the card? Should I just download Fedora2 (or some other distro) and use that? I don't really care which method I go with - I only chose RedHat because I'm most familiar with it, and I've got nothing else installed on the machine so far...
     
  2. microbrew

    microbrew New Member

    Jun 29, 2002
    NJ
    What kernel version is it? Is at least 2.6? Driver support is so much better than for 2.4. I can't specifically comment on installing 802.11 drivers being that I haven't done it myself.

    Fedora is the newest Redhat for personal use, right? If you like the rpm system, I'd say stick with it. Personally, I would use SuSE or Gentoo.
     
  3. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Doesn't matter much now - my OS hard drive on my desktop failed today (started thrashing out of the blue), so I installed XP on the laptop so my wife can use Word & Powerpoint for her schoolwork. Luckily, I've already got a new desktop machine on order, but I think I've lost all the files on that 30GB drive. :(

    Once I get the new computer up and running, I'll revisit this problem. I'll probably try to pick a distro with a 2.6 kernel.
     
  4. JeffS

    JeffS New Member

    Oct 15, 2001
    Cameron Park, CA
    Club:
    Everton FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    The 2.4 kernel is a bit week on Laptops, including with wireless cards. However, version 2.6 has made major improvements in the wireless and laptop arena. Plus, some distros have put in extra effort to make their products easier with laptops and wireless (by detecting and loading the necessary drivers/modules by default), including Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros, and Mepis.

    Red Hat/Fedora Core is probably not a good choice for laptops. Fedora Core does not have as good of hardware detection, nor does it include as many drivers (proprietary included) as the other major distros.
     
  5. JeffS

    JeffS New Member

    Oct 15, 2001
    Cameron Park, CA
    Club:
    Everton FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    BTW - microbrew added Gentoo as distro option. Gentoo would give you the best speed, as well as the most highly configured kernel installation. However, unless you have upwards of three days to wait for the installation to complete (it's all compiled from source code, rather than installing pre-compiled binaries), I would look elsewhere.
     
  6. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Noted, and thanks for the input. It'll probably be a few weeks (at least until my new desktop shows up and I have a chance to set that up, migrate my existing webserver to the old desktop machine and set up my mail server and domain controller, and then finally set up my old webserver to be a dedicated backup machine) until I get a chance to return to this, but I think I'll try out Mandrake. It is, after all, a laptop, not a server. It's got to be easy for my wife to use.
     
  7. JeffS

    JeffS New Member

    Oct 15, 2001
    Cameron Park, CA
    Club:
    Everton FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I have Mandrake 10 Official PowerPack installed on a Gateway desktop and an IBM Thinkpad 600. I absolutely adore Mandrake. It's my favorite Linux disto right now. I've tried the following:

    Red Hat
    SuSE
    Knoppix
    Mepis
    Mandrake

    Mandrake is great because:
    Brain-dead easy install
    Awesome hardware detection and autoconfiguration
    Super easy administration tools in Mandrake Control Center (stuff that would otherwise have to be done in the config files in the command line)
    Great look and feel - the themes and icons in Mandrake are beautiful and make a very pleasant computing environment
    Speed. Of the desktop and RPM oriented distros, Mandrake is the fastest. Only Gentoo or Debian or Slackware exceed it, and those distros are hard to install and use (they're for the geek-elite with lots of time on their hands).
    Cutting edge software. Mandrake is usually ahead of the curve with getting the latest stuff (Kernel, desktop environments, etc), while remaining stable and relatively bug free.
    Tons of packages, especially with the PowerPack.
    Package Management. Mandrake's urpmi and RPMdrake make downloading and installing new software brain-dead easy.
    Great user community. Mandrake has a huge and loyal user base, and the forums are very friendly and helpful. Check out MandrakeUsers.org.

    I don't mean to be an infomercial for Mandrake, but it's given me the most satisfaction of all the distros I've tried, or read out about. Mandrake has always been newbie/desktop oriented, so I think your wife will like it. It's also powerful enough, stable enough, full-featured enough to be good for techies like myself. It's a good balance.
     
  8. microbrew

    microbrew New Member

    Jun 29, 2002
    NJ
    Try Live CDs- no installation required

    I've been testing out Ubuntu Linux on an old PC I just got. It's one of the most user-friendly, highly polished, put-together distros I've seen. I've also heard good things about Mandrake and Linspire.

    Another thing is to try various live CDs (aka live-eval or bootable CD) on the laptop. Without installing anything to the harddrive, you can see how well it works with the hardware and then have your wife try it out. I know Knoppix, Suse and Ubuntu have LiveCDs.


    And yes, Gentoo requires an amount of technical proficiency. Took me about three months to get completely familiar with it. And I absolutely loathe updates to X.org or Gnome...
     
  9. JeffS

    JeffS New Member

    Oct 15, 2001
    Cameron Park, CA
    Club:
    Everton FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Try Live CDs- no installation required

    Ubuntu seems to be the latest darling of the Linux world, particularily amoung Debian and Gnome enthusiasts. I've ordered the free CD, out of curiosity. However, I doubt it will be a permanent install, as I'm more of a KDE fan, and I like more packages available on CD (for convenience sake).

    As for live CD, Mandrake has one, as does Mepis. There's also PCLinuxOS. Live CDs are becoming more and more popular. They're easy and risk free.
     
  10. patrickdavila

    patrickdavila Member

    Jan 13, 1999
    Easton, PA
    Club:
    New York Red Bulls
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Try Live CDs- no installation required

    Ubuntu seems to be the hottest/best of the Debian based distros. The guys at LUG radio love it:
    http://lugradio.org/

    My friends on the linuxlink tech show are Slackware to the core:
    http://thelinuxlink.net/tllts/

    Currently my main linux box runs Slackware. It's solid and contrary to popular belief it is not difficult to install. Slack installs have been fairly easy since version 9.1. I've run Debian and Gentoo as well. Gentoo is good for someone with a very fast machine and lots of time on their hands. Any one of those 3 is fine by me. I also have a dedicated MythTV box running Fedora2 mainly because setting up Myth was fairly easy using this HOW-TO:
    http://www.wilsonet.com/mythtv/

    I used to have a Dell Inspiron and the best laptop distro IMHO was Mandrake. Wireless setup and use was a breeze with the Linksys Prism2 card I had.

    My bootable distro of choice is Knoppix:
    http://www.knoppix.net/

    I'd like to try one of those pen drive distros soon. Also my next PC will be probably be a dual Opteron system. Unfortunately Slack does not support AMD64 yet. I'll probably go with either Fedora or Gentoo or maybe even Suse.
     
  11. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Try Live CDs- no installation required

    I'm leaning towards Mandrake for my laptop. My new PC should have shipped today, so I should have it Monday. I'm planning on using my old PC (once I get all the files off the 2nd drive) to replace my current W2K web/mail server, but I haven't decided on which distribution of Linux to use. The current web server will become the dedicated backup machine, after the addition of a new hard drive and installation of Linux (probably the same distro I use on the web server).
     
  12. JeffS

    JeffS New Member

    Oct 15, 2001
    Cameron Park, CA
    Club:
    Everton FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Try Live CDs- no installation required


    I might give Slack a try sometime. It seems that those who love it, really love it and swear by it. I just don't have time to twiddle with settings to get everything working, though. If I did have time, I would gladly do it for the fun and learning. Those desktop friendly distros like Mandrake fit my needs. However, since I love trying new things Linux, I'm quite willing to give Slack the plunge.

    Do you really believe it will be a relatively hassle free install? What kind of bumps in the road might I face?
     
  13. patrickdavila

    patrickdavila Member

    Jan 13, 1999
    Easton, PA
    Club:
    New York Red Bulls
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Try Live CDs- no installation required

    The only issue you might have is with autodetecting secondary drives (second CD/DVD drive or hard drive). As long as you know how to update the /etc/fstab file you're fine. Take a look at your current /etc/fstab and print it out. Slack doesn't automatically install the nvidia driver. So you'll need to download it and install it. You'll also have to edit the xorg.conf file.
    It's not hard, just read the instructions from the nvidia site. If you need help you can go to the following forums:
    http://linuxquestions.org - go to the Slackware forum
    http://thelinuxlink.net/forum/ - tech show forum

    In my past experiences Slackware people are very friendly and always willing to help.

    The Slack installer will ask you what your network settings are? (IP address, gatway, dhcp or static) and what general grouping of software to install (server, desktop, games). Package management in Slack has definetly progressed. You now have swaret and slapt-get. Both are very apt-get like in nature and have conf files where you put your repositories to download packages from. Both do dependency checking as well. Both should point to the following Slackware package sites:
    http://www.linuxpackages.net/
    http://www.audioslack.com/

    I personally prefer swaret but that's my preference. Try both.

    Another useful package to install is checkinstall (if you're into compiling your own software). It basically creates a package for you to install. It also comes in handy when removing and distributing packages as well.

    Let me know if you have any additional questions.
    Good luck
     
  14. JeffS

    JeffS New Member

    Oct 15, 2001
    Cameron Park, CA
    Club:
    Everton FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Try Live CDs- no installation required


    Thanks for the hot tips! I especially like the tip of copying my etc/fstab. I'm going to do that with all of my sound and video config files as well.

    Now, I just have to find some hard drive space ....

    Actually, I'm thinking of upgrading the hardrive I have on my Thinkpad 600 (now running Mandrake 10). It currently has only 6 gigs (not conducive to dual/tri/quad booting, which is what I want to do). I'll probably get a good 40 gig drive, ghost over the current drive, then install distros to my heart's desire (I'm not going to sacrifice my Mandrake 10, I like it too much), including Slack, SuSE, and perhaps Libranet.

    Anyway, my posts as well as yours and Foosinho's and microbrew's, clearly demonstrate just how fun and fascinating Linux can really be.
     

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