Novice question about laptops and wireless

[m.roth2006 at rcn.com]

Larry,

>Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:56:39 -0400
>From: "Virden, Larry W." <lvirden at cas.org>  
> 
>I've inherited a really old Dell laptop, on which is 

Please define "old".

installed a really
>old version of Redhat - I believe it is redhat 4. The 

Do you mean RH 4, or RHEL 4? The latter is not exactly "ancient" (given that we run it at work, and our rack-mounted boxes are not quite a couple of years old.)

>slowness of the
>machine, the limited amount of disk space, etc. probably has me locked
>into staying at this version.

Linux runs on *everything*, including old, small machines. Please note that you can get a release that is explicitly x386, meaning that you could, theoretically, run it on an 80386, which is what Linus started writing it for, back around '91.... I was running RH9 quite happily for years on a K6 233 MHZ system.

The only real question is what do you want to *do* on the box? Large compiles, or d/b's, will be slow. Ordinary usage - office software, browsing, email, shouldn't be slower than, say, XP on the same box. (We will *not* talk about Vista <g>) In fact, sometimes newer runs faster....
>
>The laptop does have a wireless card. I've never used a linux

Do you know what make? If it's an Atheros chipset, you want to look at madwifi.org.
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