Depends on the Netgear WG511. There are two of them released.One from taiwan and one from china. Should say on the cadrd but not sure. You would want the taiwan version. It uses a real prism54 chipset. The China version is a softmac version. Now the taiwan version uses the prism54 module. To see if your kernel has it compiled in run the command as root with the card plugged in.
/sbin/modprobe prism54

if it does not complain then good. If it does produce an error then you will need to rebuild the kernel. Not the easiest thing for a beginner. Now if it does not you might look into Fedora Core 6. Last I knew it had the prism54 module in the kernel.

Next you will need to the prism54 site. www.prism54.org under the fullmac portion get the firmware driver. http://www.prism54.org/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm

Next copy the file to /lib/modules directory and rename it to isl3890.

Now pull the card and reinsert. It should start lighting up. next configure the nic itself under your network tool. More than likely it will be the eth1 device.

Now if the china version then you need to use the windows inf driver with ndiswrapper module. Ndiswrapper will more than likely be installed but should be plenty of info here using the search tools. Also look under the HCL section here located at the top and to the right. You can get lots of info from the hardware listed there.

Hope this gets you started.
Don't let linux frustrate you. It is going to take time to learn. been at it for 8-9 years and learn something daily it seems.

Brian

it is the Made in Tawain version, but simpler language please!
and i need to choose a distribution first, im on mandriva spring free 2007, but everyone says i need something else

Good... this is a good start here. You are already getting some discussion/feedback.This is probably a good thing while you are learning. Lets see what is needed to get this going properly shall we?I suggested entering lspci in a terminal .... opening a terminal is a basic linux procedure. There will be a menu item called "terminal" someplace (each distro is different, and there are thousands of them, so I cannot point exactly to where, you just have to hunt.) The terminal is kinda like a turbocharged version of the DOS commandline, you use it the same way. Just type the letters "lspci" and press <enter>. (lspci = list pci cards.) How to copy all that should be intuitive - you can color the text in with your mouse, rt-click and select "copy", then paste to a text file or something.

If you don't have net access from the laptop (???) then you can put the file in a floppy or keydrive or somesuch and so transfer to the windows box, which, I am guessing is how you are talking to me.

As much as I personally dislike the mandriva distro - since it is installed, I would like to see some information about this computer before you try installing a different one.

Each distro has it's own strengths and weaknesses.

I don't think you are going to get anywhere unless you can come to grips with some linux basics. The terminal for eg.

here is the basic mandriva 2006 stuff
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Mandriva

(Note: while everything I've told you can be obtained through the gui, the terminal commands are universal to linux and other unix-like operating systems. When you get help online, it will almost always take the form of terminal commands... so they allow others with differing distros to provide assistance which will also be applicable to anyone else in trouble regardless of distro.)

A terminal tutorial (written for ubuntu but it is fairly universal) can be found at
http://ualug.ece.auckland.ac.nz/resources.htm
... it covers basic concepts of linux from a plain-language, practical, standpoint, concentrating on the terminal. Download the tarball, unpack it by double-clicking on it's icon and dragging the files to an open window or your desktop.

The terminal in KDE is called "Konsole".

This said - it is usual to start absolute newcomers off with Ubuntu or Kubuntu. However, you may find yourself better off with SimplyMepis - despite it's more complex approach than Ubuntu, more things tend to work out of the box.

I'll have a look at your laptop and hardware in another post.

Solo 9300 Laptop

This is actually quite a nice "older" laptop with an intel chipset. So everything onboard should pretty-much just go.

Which processor option has been installed? (Hoping for PIII but guessing mobile-celeron).

32Mb onboard RAM will be a bit of a tight squeeze, but doable. If you can get the SDRAM expansion boards, you can get this quite respectable.

ATI Mobility-P graphics should be supported by the radeon driver (autodetected at installation - don't worry). We'll worry about 3D acceleration later on. Video OK? (you won't be able to play mpeg, wma, avi etc files out of the box due to copyright issues.)

Audio ESS 19788 chipset - never heard of it - sound going OK? (You won't be able to play mp3 files out of the box due to copyright issues.)

There is no pre-installed network access, which is probably why you are relying on those pcmcia cards

Wired network access is usually well supported in linux, while wireless access usually requires some sort of tool to be downloaded via the net access you don't have... the classic catch 22.

The Wg511 - made in taiwan, we see has a prism chipset... very nice, we should be able to get that going. Once you have any kind of network connection going, the rest is quite simple.

I can give you step-by-step, but you need to know how to open a terminal and type stuff into it first. Can you do that?

Making WG511 (made in Taiwan) work with linux:

From previous information, you need firmware for the card to work. Ideally, I'd like to see the result of lspci for the card... but ho hum.

The firmware is:

http://www.prism54.org/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm
(I think you can rt-click on the link and "save target as" in IE ... firefox will provide the option on a single left click.)

You will end up with a file called 1.0.4.3.arm
Transfer this file to your madriva computer by your favorite means. Put it in your home folder... open a terminal. Enter the following commands:

cd ~

su -

(you'll be prompted for the root password)

mv 1.0.4.3 /lib/modules/isl3890

you may also need to do:

ln -s /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890 /lib/modules/isl3890

...and you're finished, close the terminal.
Don't worry if the commands look archane, you'll be able to figure them out soon enough. If you run into trouble, copy the command and the result to a reply here.

replug the card (or reboot with the card inserted, but it should hotplug).

With network access, you can use urpmi and the wiki from an earlier post to get all the functionality you desire. For multimedia, you'll find that ogg/vorbis (audio) and ogg/theora (video) formats are supported out of the box. You can convert almost all other formats to these two with the command-line tool "ffmpeg2theora" - which is probably easiest.

urpmi ffmpeg2theora

... will probably work to get this tool installed. In terminal:

ffmpeg2theora mysong.mp3
... will convert "mysong.mp3" to "mysong.ogg" which will be vorbis format.

ffmpeg2theora mymovie.mpeg
... will convert an mpeg video file to "mymovie.ogg" theora format.

Mandriva will rip to theora and vorbis format by default, so you need never see another restricted format again. Realplayer and WMP7+ can be pursuaded to play the formats if you should want to share media with your windows-loving mates.

I posted this back about 3 years maybe. Not sure if it is any clearer.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=295200

What Simon Bridge was saying is about the same. Following that and others here should get you going.

Brian

Has anyone mentioned the many live distros available for people to boot into Linux without changing their hard drive partitions and allow them to get some really good familiarising experience with Linux without the risk of damage to the system

Nah, I say wipe that hard drive entirely and then install Linux as the only OS. You'll be surprised to find out how fast you learn new things when you have to (just make sure you have all the install materials downloaded first, because you won't have net access for awhile.)

I don't think he MEANT to insult you, but it did come across that way.
Your tone seems to be something like: "I dare you to show me that Linux is better/will work for me/etc." I, for one, will not take that bait. Those that have taken the time to learn it will extol the virtues and--if totally honest--will also share the horror stories.

PS: This:
gives the impression that YOU don't think you are smart enough. In my experience, most people who say they CAN'T do something are really saying they DON'T WANT TO.

Well ... I just figured out that my (X)Ubuntu 7.04 supports my D-Link PCMCIA wireless card in the default kernel.

The D-Link DWL-650 rev. M card uses the Realtek 8180 chip ... the Ubuntu 7.04 release has that module built as r818x.

see: /lib/modules/2.6.20-15-generic/kernel/ubuntu/wireless

A simple modprobe ... and now I have wireless.

I am very impressed that the new Ubuntu kernel has a number of cutting edge wireless driver modules built already.

Give Ubuntu a try, it's easy to install and run, and seems good at hardware recognition.

This is not to discriminate between windows and linux
but worth a view

Ubuntu Vs Vista :

http://www.lamprnd.org/