I am very new to linux but don't mind a LINing curve as long as there is light at the end of the tunnel .

I have a new/old 256 meg laptop I want to install on.

I was looking for the leanest command line only distros and arch and tinycore kept popping up as recommendations.

I have been playing around a little with both but have yet to install either.

By the way I only really need to rdp to my main windows computer from other parts of my apartment so I don't require anything but the bare bones.

I liked the bare bones philosophy initially of microcore however there is alot less documentation than with the arch and almost non existent vs huge community respectively.

I got stuck so far with microcore install trying to setup my usb wireless device. Where arch layed all the info out in a wiki and the tools were already there for me to use, with micro I would try several of the same commands only to find they weren't there.

So I'm unsure whether it's worth proceeding with micro? I don't mind the extra work but is it going to be easy enough to setup wlan on it? if so how do I do it? and will it be more plain sailing then once I have internet access on there and I can just wget what I need? or are there many more hurdles to climb?

To reiterate though I would be more interested in trying to get tiny/micro core going if it is going to be faesible.

TinyCore is GREAT, until it comes to wifi.

I prefer the frugal install, and recommend that. If, however, WIFI is critical, then I would install SPARKY, ARCH, MINT, or something light but installs to native disk. Debian is light, if you do not install either full Gnome, KDE, or the common replacements: use something light like OpenBox, LXDE, or Fluxbox.

BE warned, if you have one of the broadcom WIFI interfaces, or another that does not support Linux well, there may be manual steps to getting it to work. It can be done (yes, even with TinyCore, though it is not easy) but you may have to search and try things using a wired connection before getting it to fly.

Hi & Welcome to Linux Questions.

Since you have an older pc I recommend Tiny Core Linux.
It's a light weight distribution-
I've never ran Tiny Core but I'm sure that there are members here running it with experience.

With your usb wireless dongle you will need to search for the linux driver for that particular make and model of the dongle. Installing the driver should be fairly easy once you know the commandline utility that will help you to install it. Most distributions have a package manager that installs the driver for you. Debian uses g-debi. I don't know what Tiny Core uses and I couldn't find it in the FAQ about Tiny Core.
http://tinycorelinux.net/faq.html

-::- Do you know what type and model your usb dongle is?

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:setting_up_wifi
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tiny_Core_...igure_wireless

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore
http://www.tinycorelinux.net/

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:mirrors

My usb device is the alfa awus 036h.

I know it works for linux because I had it setup within seconds in arch but I don't know how to do it in tiny because all the command line utils arch had by default micro doesn't have mostly.

I installed the OS fine by donwloading a couple of things via wired connection.

The problem I'm facing now is getting the laptop to see my usb wifi. In ifconfig it isn't there.

All the things I'm reading say to use lsusb as their first step but of cource tiny doesn't have it. And whereas other tools are easily downloable that doesn't seem to be available as a download so I'm looking for a substitute.

I'm looking at libusb right now which seems it might be the one for the job.

So advice regarding how to get the laptop to see it is welcome.

please put the output of "lsusb" after installing the extension usbutils.tcz
we can understand what usb wifi you have.
my experience: tinycore is good supported for wifi (I would not expect it dont work; in the extreme case, you could use ndiswrapper).

please put the output of "lsusb" after installing the extension usbutils.tcz
we can understand what usb wifi you have.
my experience: tinycore is good supported for wifi (I would not expect it dont work; in the extreme case, you could use ndiswrapper).

I believe now that I jsut need to install the driver for the device, gonna try now.

Since I read that for archlinux those drivers are installed automatically so that's why it worked for that one vs tiny I reckon.

When working with TinyCore, you need to read the documents on adding WIFI to TinyCore, not the pages on ARCH.

Different things work, and the things that are the same may work differently.
Expecting ARCH procedures to work with TinyCore is like expecting RED HAT procedures to work with Ubuntu! You may get lucky, but that is the wrong way to bet!

i'm a little confused now, what has op installed?

in any case, i think any cli-only install would do for that hardware.
but i think archlinux is perfect for your usage scenario.
it also has the right documentation to help you solve your problems.

BTW: there is NOTHING wrong with loading TinyCore frugal mode on a machine also loading ARCH linux. The dual-boot options are pretty well documented on the TinyCore WIKI pages.

ARCH goes well with almost everything. TinyCore goes well with almost everything. I see no reason not to have them both on the same machine.

I have installed tinycore command line only for anyone confused.

So I made some progress now.

I managed to install some related wireless and usb packages with 'tce' the 'yum' equivalent package manager.

Unfortunately there were alot of realtek related ones but couldnt find a driver for my device. There was even 8188...so close yet so far when mine it 8187

I even have the linux driver from the realtek website but i dont know how to install it with tinycore? Because realtek instructions say use 'make' and 'make install' but those commands dont exist on tiny. Maybe I need to use tce something which I havent tried.

I did lsusb and now the realtek shows up which is the rtl8187 chipset.

EDIT: WEeehaaay! I'm in! The last package I put on was wifi.sh and when I ran it somhow my device just charged up and the light came on and all good .

Next to setup my remote desktop.

In that case the driver would have to be compiled. Did you end up running:
./configure, make and make install?

So your WiFi is up and running now? Your able to surf the net?

But but I dont believe it I switch it on and the screen wont turn on. I can hear the boot up beep for the adaptor and the hd is going but the screen is not swtiching on.

I only got this like 3 days ago on ebay.

Dell inspiron 8500.

I didn't do anything at all to it. I went out for an hour, left it swtiched off plugged into the mains and come back to this?

Is all you have is a black screen but the laptop is on?

That is correct. I can hear the normal hard drive activity and no error beeps.

Im unfamiliar with laptops. Ive used desktop all my life.

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