I'm working on a laptop to make it incredibly easy for a complete computer n00b to use. I decided to give Linpus Linux a try because of the interfaces I had seen on the Acer EEE PCs... I have it up and running and everything is going really well except for the, guess what, wireless. Thus is my issue...

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite P35-S611 (circa 2005)
I'm not of the exact model of the wireless card, but I believe it's a Realtek 8187 (definitely a Realtek, not so definitive on the number)
I'm using the only version of Linpus that's actually available from linpus.com (worthless website)

In the Network Configuration it shows me that it sees some sort of wireless card and gives me these details for the wireless:
Description: ndiswrapper
Type: Wireless
Device: wlan0
Status: Configured

Just for reference, these are the details I get for the wired connection:
Description: Realtek Semiconducter Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+
Type: Ethernet
Device: eth0
Status: ok

I took the mention of ndiswrapper and expected that I would just be able to find the windows wireless drivers, load them up in ndiswrapper, and I'd be good to go. Unfortunately I failed at finding the driver. Just to look a little deeper into the matter I tried to get into ndiswrapper from the terminal; no cheese. I checked the package manager and it doesn't look like ndiswrapper is even installed.

I've been dealing with trying to get peripherals to work in Ubuntu all day for a kid that wants to play games in Linux and my brain is now pooped... Anybody wanna do my thinking for me?

Welcome to LQ!!

See if you can find your wireless adapter using either dmesg or lspci. Then do some Googling to see what drivers are available. ndiswrapper should be your last resort.

Did you manage to install linpus to the hard disc?
If so, how did you do that?

I am struggling with it. It works fine in live CD mode but i cant get it to install.



On your wireless issue ndiswrapper is most certainly the way to go. You need to find the windows drivers for the wireless card, to go with it though.
Don't forget that Linpus is based on Fedora, so packages for Fedora or RedHat will probably work in Linpus

spegru

ifconfig -a
shows your wireless?
linpus has a bash script add_driver.sh under /usr/bin i think that creates a ath0 device from wifi0.
At least that's what happens on Acer Aspire One.