Novice question about laptops and wireless

[Virden, Larry W.]

I unfortunately don't have the laptop model with me right now, nor the
model of the wireless card - two really good pieces of information that
I should have gotten before I posted. I apologize. 

As for what I mean by old - the laptop is 7 or more years old, I'd
hazard a guess.

How can I tell between RH and RHEL?

As for what I want to do with the laptop - two things. The number one
thing I want to do is to be able to take it to the library, connect to
their wi-fi, and use a web browser to browse web sites, read email, etc.

The second thing I want to do is to be able to install a version of tcl
and supplimental libraries and write some code.  I don't envision that
to be a big deal - the compiles will be a limited number, and the
interpreter runs normally with minimal impact on the system.

So, if I can get the wi-fi stuff to work, I should be pretty well set. 


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-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of m.roth2006 at rcn.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 10:26 AM
To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
Subject: Re: Novice question about laptops and wireless

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.
<snip>
     mark

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