Networking :: Getting Wireless on an Old Laptop

I am Linux n00b in need of help. I have a formidable NEC Versa 6060 Laptop with a whopping 32mb of ram and a blistering p166 with that futuristic MMX technology all the kids rave about.

DSL is the only distro that makes my machine very, very fast ... only problem I can't get my Linksys WPC11 version 3 wireless card to work with it. I have tried to configure it, but to no avail--unless I missed something. I could put the driver from Linksys on a floppy or USB flash drive, but then I don't know how to get it in the system (I have read and tried, read, and tried--I seem to suck at this).

Could somebody be kind enough to help a N00b get this straightened out? I am afraid of getting windoze DTs.

By the way, DSL is installed on the HD and is the only thing on there.

Ooh, exactly the specs of my Toshiba (P166 MMX/32RAM). But when booting, it turns out mine only runs at 165 MHz, so yours must be faster :-)

I can help a little, not a lot. You need to 'mount' the removable device in Linux. This means you run the mount command with the proper specs, then you will go to a directory on the HD , and find the contents of the removable drive there.

Copy the file to a floppy disk from another system
Put the disk in the notebook
Open a command window
Type "mount /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy" <--from memory
(could be "mount /dev/fd1 /mnt/floppy" or something similar.

Type 'ls /dev' to get a listing of all possible devices, and 'ls /mnt' to see all current mount points. (This would work for a CD you had burned too, "mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom")

Anyway, after you get the floppy mounted, you can go to that directory ("cd /mnt/floppy") and copy the file(s) to somewhere more useful (i.e. "cp * /home/DSL" --this is a command line copy method - cp SOURCE_FILE(s) TARGET_DIR )

Now, what to do with the files once you get them there, don't know, but there are probably web resources to help you there.

Thanks, I will give it a shot and let you know how it works out. I sincerely appreciate your help, man!

Oh, the p166 actually shows up as 164 at boot, so you got me beat you speed demon!

Actually, you almost got it right.

DSL won't let the user mount the floppy, so the correct command would be

sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

fd1 would be the second floppy drive (if you had one!)

Good Luck!

Thanks everyone ... now if only I can figure out how to install these drivers properly!

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