Hello - first of all my apologies, I'm approaching this from a standpoint of absolutely no knowledge about Linux, programming or anything relevant... As I imagine is the case with many of this community, Im looking for a way to unburden myself from the frustration of Windows and all it's crashing, slothful nastiness, and essentially just want a simple solution to this problem.

So my issue is - my house has a wireless network that I can connect to through Windows but havent been able to get to work through PClinux OS (running from CD). Its listed on my hardware profile (in Windows) as Asus 802.11g Network Adapter, and that's all the info I know about it. I know the guidelines to posting mention a /sbin/lspci command, but Im afraid my knowledge of Linux doesn't even extend to knowing how to input this. I suppose this is what comes of being spoonfed graphical interfaces all my life. I feel silly asking, but does anyone have some simple tips for an easy transition to the shiny world of Linux? Since my needs are relatively few (ease of use, internet/word processing/music + video manipulation), i think i could simply choose a release that supports my hardware - is there a particular OS that i should go for?

Really, any help given would be much appreciated, and if you need any more information from me before answering please let me know.

Thanks in advance,

Andy

A BIG welcome to Linux!

With PCLinuxOS, open up the Konsole program. This will get you a terminal emulator (i.e. a command-line prompt). From there, type in "/sbin/lspci -v" and press Enter. This will run the lspci (list PCI) program, which will scan your hardware's PCI buses to see what sort of hardware you have. The "-v" will make lscpi output extra details (i.e. "-v" means "verbose"). You'll see a bunch of information appear in Konsole. Just copy and paste this into a forum post. It will help us determine which drivers you will need.

You will find the most difficult part of Linux is unlearning Windows. Here's a brief description of directories in Linux:

/bin. This is where the command-line binaries (i.e. executables) are. These are very simple programs that are used by more complex ones.

/usr. This contains the following directories:
/usr/bin. This is where all your applications are (including Konsole and KDE).
/usr/games. This is where a lot of your games are.
/usr/X11R6/bin. This is usually a symbolic link to /usr/bin, but it contains programs specific to X (i.e. the X server, startx, xinit, and a bunch of xclients).
/usr/local/. This usually has nothing but a few directories (servers, however, use this a lot).
/usr/share. This shares hardware-independent data for programs (i.e. bitmaps, sound effects, documentation, some configuration files, etc).
/usr/src. This is where source code to programs you build are stored. This will probably be empty for you.
/usr/lib. This stores application libraries (this is kind of like C:\WINDOWS\System32 in Windows).
/usr/sbin. This contains applications intended to be run by the superuser (i.e. root).

/etc. This stores the system-wide configuration. Programs you install may store their default configurations here. Also, this directory contains OS-specific configurations (i.e. power-management configuration, X server configuration, daemon configurations, etc.)

/boot. This stores info for booting the system, such as kernel images, initrd images, bootloader configuration, etc.

/home. This stores your personal data. This is like C:\Documents and Settings\.

/root. This is the root user's home folder.

/sys, /proc. These contain info about the running state of the system.

/sbin. This contains basic programs intended for use by the superuser (i.e. root).

/var. This contains log files, caches, file locks, etc.

/dev. This contains device files. In Linux (and Unix in general), everything on the system is represented by a file. Hardware devices are represented by device files. For example, your hard drive, you sound card, your graphics card, the terminal emulator device that Konsole connects to, etc. are represented as files in this directory. On my system, for example, my disk is /dev/sda, my graphics card is /dev/nvidia0, etc.

/lib. This contains essential system libraries.

/media, /mnt. In Linux, you attach additional storage devices (i.e. USB sticks) to the system by mounting them onto an empty directory. These directories can be anywhere, but are traditionally stored in these directories. For example, on my system /mnt/usbstick is usually an empty directory, but when I plug in my USB stick (it will automatically be mounted), this directory will contain everything on my USB stick. When I unmount (i.e. click "Safely remove hardware") the stick, this directory will become empty. This is sort of like how in Windows a new letter drive (i.e. E will appear on the system when you plug it in, and when you remove it the drive disappears.

/tmp. This contains temporary files that are erased every time the system reboots.

Hope this helps!

Ah, thankyou so much for that - should be extremely helpful. A bit of a busy week at the moment so i havent had chance to play around with it recently, but ill try to have the output of that posted in a day or so.

Thanks again,

Andy

For the command-line part, check out www.linuxcommand.org which is a great place to start learning Linux the shell way

Using wireless devices under Linux is at the moment a bit tricky, if you don't happen to have a very common device that somebody has built a native driver for. In many cases the operating system might detect the wireless card correctly but the driver wouldn't still work. In this case you are given a possibility to use Windows drivers for the device trough software like ndiswrapper (or madwifi); it's not the preferred way on an open source system, of course, because it just encourages manufacturers to keep on writing Windows-only drivers, but it's a solution when you need one. For example for ndiswrapper there are good tutorials on the web, and here at LQ. Usually the how-tos are a bit distribution-specific, but if you know how to obtain/install software from the web in your distribution, with little modifications nearly all the how-tos work. The best is of course if you happen to find one that suits your environment. But before ramming at ndiswrapper or similar, first spend a little time thinking and try if the native drivers worked; it's probably a lot easier in the long run.

I'm only to get a laptop in the near future, with wifi, so I'm not a professional on this matter yet, but you could try using some of the "iw-commands" probably found on your system (if the graphical tools don't seem to get anything done) to see if the device works; for example, by running (using the Konsole mentioned in earlier post)
and seeing what that says. It probably asks you to fill in more, to give an argument, but you should see it from there. Wireless is fairly easy to get working with a little aid from people who already have done that, so I'm confident you're wireless sooner than you think.

Oh, and forgot to say: welcome!

P.s. just to mention, about "unlearning Windows": on Linux it's very common that you have one or more tools, both graphical and command-line programs, that deal with same tasks. For example you could listen to our mp3 files from command-line or using a graphical player, or manage your network devices trough command-line programs or using a graphical tool meant for that. It is important to understand that these programs, altough separate (and possibly from separate programmers), affect on the same things: it does not matter which tool you use, except for yourself. You should pick up the tools you feel most comfortable; for a beginner the programs with nice graphical user interface might be the best choice, and when you get more experience, you might notice that the command-line programs are "faster to use". Nevertheless, you will probably get multiple different instructions on dealing with problems, so don't be afraid: it's usually more or less all the same which way you do things, as long as you just understand what you are doing. Usually tools with graphical user interfaces may differ depending on which desktop system you use (KDE has different-looking tools than Gnome, and the same goes for all the rest) or even your distribution (some distributions use a little tweaked tools than the original ones); then again, since this is Linux, most of the (GNU) command-line programs are identical so dealing with command-line could be easier since that way your distribution or desktop system does not matter (anybody can help you). There are some distribution-specific command-line programs, or ways of doing some things (like managing system startup services), but like I said -- when it's about command-line (shell, console, terminal, ...) it's a bit easier to work over distribution and/or desktop limits. Nonetheless it's a good idea to always mention which distribution you are using, and a version too, and here at LQ it's a good idea to add that information to your profile -- that way you don't have to write it all the time, and it's visible in every post you write.

I wish you a pleasant stay.