Greetings,

Total NOOB. Been working at this new Linux thing for hours and hours and hours and feel like I'm making no headway.

Slackware 10.2

Just installed a couple days ago. Painful experience... it seems like everything is going wrong and I'm drowning.

The goal is to ad asterisk to the system. In order to do that I have to install a bunch of programs. The instructions seem to say I can directly download from the sites using some commands... great, but I don't have internet access. Bought a d-link wireless PCI adapter DWL-520 (version B) I think. Put it in the box. Can't get it started. Hear about ndiswrapper. Sounds great, but I can't figure out how to put it on the system... no internet access... ok, I'll burn the file onto a cd using my xp system (Direct CD) (separate box). Try to access this burnt cd in the linux box.... it doesn't work. The cdrom will read some disks (seems to read installation type disks), but not any of my burned cd's. (the error says something about specifying filetype). I just think it can't read burned cd's, I'd read about this in another thread.

I've been on xp for years, and am tired of MS, thought I'd try this, but #$%& its been painful. In addition to any advice on the wireless issue, please feel free to suggest a site with excellent tutorials. I've looked, but haven't found anything that is that useful to me.

Sorry for the long post, I'm just pissed and tired. I'm going to sleep and will dream that some kind person(people)will have provided me with the magic bullet tomorrow - for the problems, not for my head.

Cheers,

MercuryRising

I like slackware but I'd never recommend it for newbies. Unless your somewhat familiar with the typical linux configuration files, you are going to have a hard time with slack.
If you feel like your in over your head, try an easier, newbie friendly distro like mandriva, suse, kanotix, pclos, mepis for a kde desktop or ubuntu or fedora for a gnome desktop.

And if you still want to go with Slack:
Use lspci to determine the chipset of your card. I do not know why manufacturers do it, but DWL-520 is one of the cards made using different chipsets.
"Direct CD" probably means packet writing. If you want Linux to read these CD-R's you need to enable it in the kernel.

Thanks for your response. This is painful. I don't even know what you mean. How do I "enable it in the kernel". I know this must be a stupidly basic question, but I've spent the last 3 hours trying to find resources online that will guide me on this. I must be blind. Please advise and please share any sites where I can go for basic questions like this. I appreciate your time and if I can find the resources I will try to do the research first before posting here.

Thanks!

Dave

Thanks for the suggestion. I may have to move to something simpler. I'm shocked at how much difficulty I'm having with this. While not a genius, I can usually find the resources the answers to my xp questions pretty easily.

Cheers,

Dave

Enabling in the kernel. This means configuring and compiling your own kernel. I've never used this kind of CD-R's myself, but I believe there is an option under filesystems for this. Alternatively you could burn "normal" CD-R's under Windows using Nero or like. But you've decided not to use this "manual" distro for now?

Actually, I will continue to use it for a while longer in the hopes that I can learn this. If I fail at this, I will try something else.

Cheers,

Dave

Hi Everyone,

After trying somemore I took someones advice and went to a more noobie friendly (I think) distribution SUSE 10.0 Of course, I'm having problems there also, but it does seem to be easier.

Thanks again for your help!

MercuryRising