Laptops :: Problems getting old laptop on DSL/DSL-N

I'd like to lay out my general strategy and issues here, and then break out other posts as necessary.

I have a Dell Latitude CP, 166MHz laptop.
The audio card is a Crystal 4237B.

It has a hard drive, cd-rom, and one usb.

Here's what I want to do:
Set this up to autoboot into an image slideshow, using images from the local hard drive, usb media card reader, or network location.
Image slideshow would hopefully display .mov files on the screen as well.

Here's what I've tried:
Setup DSL (ver 4)
Setup feh
Run the slideshow

Problems with this attempt:
My wireless card would not connect to the internet
I could not get sound (my card is supposedly supported by ALSA but I couldn't get that running)
feh wouldn't view my images since they're EXIF JPEGs. (I believe this is the case.)

I've also tried this:
Setup DSL-N (RC 4)
Replaced the wireless card with a wired card that is auto-detected.

Problems with this:
I don't know if sound is working, the media players seem to crash when I try an mp3.
Can't install feh, since I can't get apt-get to work correctly.

Current issue:
I'm on DSL-N.
I'm trying to get jpeg62 6b-13 installed since it is supposed to have EXIF support.
I downloaded the package from the Debian/Sarge distro (many of those packages worked for me when I was playing with DSL.)
I do this:
sudo dpkg -i libjpeg62_6b-13_i386.deb

I get this:
dpkg: 'install-info' not found on PATH.
dpkg: 1 expected program(s) not found on PATH.
NB: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin

If I go in as su and then I cat $PATH I get this:
cat: /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/games: No such file or directory

Any help, thoughts, suggestions or corrections are welcome.

You may wish to try to search the forums for Dell. As I recall older Dell systems had many challenges. Most were solved with posts from literally years ago.

For your wireless card I found 2 cards that load great after install. the linksys wpc11 version 2 or 3 and the Netgear ma401 they are very cheap on ebay run ya about 10 bucks. I would highly recommend either one of these wireless cards

I use dsln from time to time on a dell latitude d400 - rather than using apt-get/dpkg, you would probably be better off to try and compile jpeg, etc from source. Although I hven't used it lately, alsa was working and you could probably use wireless via ndiswrapper

original here.