Hello, I'm very new to Linux. I'm going into networking and somebody in my class suggested that I start getting acquainted with Linux. He gave me a CD that I'm booting off of for now. It is made by Overclox. I haven't installed it on my system because I'm still trying to decide if I want to commit to it. The other part of it is that I'm not sure how I would install it so that I could choose which OS I want to boot.

Now on to my question. I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 that has a TrueMobile 1300 wireless card. When I tried to connect to the internet I quickly discovered that the software didn't have drivers for my wireless card so I was wondering where I could get that, and how I install it on my system. Is there any way that I could put it in folder on my hard drive so that when I boot Linux off of the CD I can use it? Or do I have to install Linux on my computer to be able to do that?

I'd really appreciate any help that anybody could offer. I want to get started on the right foot with Linux. A lot of people seem to really like it and I want to find out why. Thanks!!!

Hope this helps...

I run an Inspiron 8200 with a Dell Truemobile 1300 card as well. I did serious battle with this card and a native linux driver, many posts back and forth on the LWAN lists too. Never got it to work under my Redhat 9 install and I'm no Linux Newb.

Here's how I got it to work in mere seconds, yes, seconds:

http://www.linuxant.com

Pay the 20 bucks for the permanent driver, 30 day eval is available.

I installed the eval in seconds and the next day spent the best 20 bucks of my life.

This post brought to you from my Dell Inspiron 8200 w/Dell Truemobile 1300 Wireless G card.

:-)

Also, you may want to google 'linux dell inspiron 8500' for more setup details. That machine has a lot of new hardware which you may want to grab some speicific setup info to get everything running 100%.

I've installed a couple of those machines with Linux and they run great once you know what you need to install as extra's.

HTH!!

Oh, and never fear!! Take the plunge!

You will need to have a linux install on the hard drive to add new modules or you'll have to re-burn the boot CD with the driver modules on it. Also, Inspiron 8500's have an onboard Broadcom NIC that won't work until you DL the bcm1000 (i think that's the one) module, too. (this nic is so new, its not included with winXP or 2K3 yet either). You'll find the right stuff with a google on 'linux inspiron 8500' It's been pretty well documented by more than a few folks.

HTH again!!

I too have an Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop and I think I'll try Mandrake 10 (out since a couple of days and I heard pretty good things about it).

Don't use linuxant. There is a free, open source, alternative called ndiswrapper wich is working with the TM1300 since at least v0.1 (now at v0.8rc).

You will need nvidia drivers if you want 3d acceleration (for my nVidia Geforce4 4200 Go). You will find them here

For the Broadcom BCM 4401, you will find the linux drivers from here .

You can look for some user feedback with the DI8500/DI8600 on linux from some sites like Linux on Laptops or TuxMobil

Good luck! (and good luck to me too... )

big_gie

I had tried the NDIS Wrapper program, too. It gave me headaches and never really funtioned for me. Its worth a shot though if you're up for it.

The reason I would suggest Linuxant is that the free 30 day demo installed and had my card running with no work on my end beyond running the install script in under 90 seconds, from download to wireless connectivity. It was simple and to this day has given me zero grief - I boot, my wireless card always works. What more can you ask for? I spent well over $2,000.00 worth of aggravation and frustrastion prior to finding Linuxant.

Linux is free... you could pay for linuxant, if you want... but there is some free alternatives.

Thanks for all the help. It's given me lots of stuff to look into and check out. How do I install Linux on my computer so that I can boot into either Windows or Linux? Sorry if it's a dumb question, but I just don't know how. Once again, thanks for the help!

Find a decent partition manager, for windows if you want. Then resize your HD. For linux, you should have:
1- One ext3 partition for booting wich should be ~100Mb.
2- One swap partiton for the memory swapping ~twice the size of your RAM
3- One ext3 partition for the installation and personnal data. Put a least 2~3 Gb for this partition, if not more!
You could put more partition, but for begining those 3 are the minimum.

Now before installing, get a Boot Manager. You can find some wich arent free (the best one is OSL2000) and others wich are open source (I'm using Smart BootManager, there is also Gag; Gag is easier to install). Install the one you want. I've already lost my Windows installation because Fedora installed a boot manager (Grub) on the partition and windows didn't liked it. With a 3th party bootmanager, you won't have problems.

Now that their is a boot manager, and you HD is partitioned, run the installation by booting the cd. Choose all the option you want. Their should be an option in the installation to "automaticly partition the harddrive". Choose the manual option. You will see your entire HD with different partitions on it. You now need to "mount" your partitions you just made to something linux will know of. So go like this:
mount partition #1 to "\boot"
You don't need to mount "swap", linux find it alone
mount partition #3 to "\"
When I say "partition #1 or #3" I'm refering to the ones you've created for linux on the begining of this post...
You should see those options of mounting in the advanced partitioning part of the installation. Just don't forget to do this, and not "delete all windows partition"...

A last thing, when you are asked to install the bootmanager, you will have the choice to install Grub or LILO. You can't say "don't install any!!!" but you can say to install one of the two on the first linux partition (the \boot one). So when you will boot your computer, the BIOS will check on the Master Boot Record (mbr) of your hard drive, will see the boot manager you installed earlier (maybe gag? ) Gag will now give you the choice to load whatever you want, windows or linux. If you boot linux, gag will give control to Grub/LILO wich is on the linux partition. You will have another choice of booting: linux or windows.

Thats it!
I know the "double boot managers" is a bit strange, but installing grub once scrapted my Windows partition... I had to reinstall By setting grub to load after 1 second isnt a big deal. The difference between the boot managers I suggested to install and grub/LILO is that grub/lilo install themselves on a partition, while the ones I suggested are small enough to be installed on the MBR, wich is what we want if we don't want to corrupt the Windows partition Windows is pretty sensible... poor windows...:P

Well I hope this is enough for the installation!!! Good luck!!!!