After getting some excellent help regarding convincing Slackware and a Dell Laptop wireless card to play well together I have decided to introduce myself.

I am me.

While I know next to nothing about Slackware I have been around computers for awhile starting in the 1980s where I worked on a "Tempest certified" system in the Marine Corps. While my work section never handled classified information that system, with all the shields in place and the fine mesh covering the monitor unharmed, could process classified information.

Currently in boxes I have my first and second computers, a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (with 16K memory module and thermal printer) and an XT clone (8086) with DOS 5. It has 1 MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive.

I then moved on to a position in Government where along with the job I was hired for I was, since no one else wanted the responsibility, the Systems Security Administrator for an obsolete Wang computer system. Basically assigning user IDs on the local system and troubleshooting basic system problems. However mainly it was responding to vital calls of "Hey this printer is out of paper"

I acquired a "hand me down" Windows 95 system that I put 98SE on and expanded the RAM to the maximum it would handle along with adding the most powerful CPU it could deal with.

From there I moved on to hand me down XP systems.

Still with me? Good, I'm about finished.

Since Microsoft has decided to abandon XP I had been toying with the idea of a Linux based system Which brings us to the present day. I have one system dual booting XP and Slackware.

I have also played around with Puppy Linux (Slacko Puppy).

Hello and welcome to the forum, thank you for sharing your background with us.

Welcome to the forums!

You sound like an avid tinkerer with systems.

Glad you're enjoying the Linux experience.

Regarding much older systems I've found it is a mix. Using an older version of Linux sometimes helps with older hardware, and sometimes the newer versions work just fine. What it boils down to are the video and audio hardware and whether they followed something mainstream or if they were a "one of". And in that latter case, being "one of" nothing works except one particular driver on one particular version of Linux.

Welcome to the forum.