Laptops :: Sound and wireless



I am relatively new to linux and I have searched this forum for sulutions but I didn't find anything that would help me.

I need to know how to check what hardware I have so that I can ask people for help. I am having problems with sound and wireless. So how do I check what hardware is detected? I am pretty sure that both the wireless and audio is detected, but thye are not working. There is eth0 and eth1 so I know one is wired and one is wireless. The audio is ali... something I don't know because it moves too fast when it boots.
Thanks for the help.

Mike

**EDIT**
I still want to know how to do this under linux.
I used AIDA32 in windows xp and it told me this:
ALi M5455 AC'97 Audio Controller
Harris/Intersil PRISM 802.11g Wireless Adapter PCI
So how do I make these two thing work?
Thanks a lot guys.

**EDIT 2**
Well I keep on learing new things as I wait for an answer.
i typed lsmod and this is a part of it.
prism54  0
firmware_class  0 [prism54]
soundcore  2[ali5455]
ac97_codec  0[ali5455]
what now?

**EDIT 3**
Ok I got the sound working by following the instructions for the alsa extension.
I got this from here  LINK.
Quote

Stage 2 of the install: Wireless Networking

Ok now that the base system is on, time to get some features working. First up is that wireless card. Though the drivers are installed you need to go grab the firmware off of this site:

http://prism54.org

Go to the Firmware section and download the 1.0.4.3.arm file. Rename the file isl3890 and place it in the /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware directory. After that you can manually startup the network card using ifconfig and iwconfig. I haven't managed to get Fedora's ifcfg-eth1 scripts to setup and activate the network card correctly. Instead I wrote the following script that sets everything up and activates the wireless card for my home network:

#!/bin/bash
# Dry start to load firmware
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 up
# Wait a sec to make sure it's good and loaded
sleep 2
# Now really load it
/sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid MYNET Managed channel 6 key VERYLONGKEYCODE
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 192.168.2.36 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/route add default gw 192.168.2.1




I am running DSL off of a USB Pen, how do I do this in DSL? Thanks.
Can I use something similiar to this post POST

By the way, it says something about cant upload isl3890 when DSL is booting.

original here.