I have an Averatec laptop with 1.39 ghhrz, 224 ram and 27.9 gb hard drive and an S3 Graphic ProSavage DDR.
I burned an ISO of DSL and it booted from Cd with no problem but I noticed as it loaded my USB peripherals it did not recognize my D-Link DWL G122 usb Wifi adapter.
I used the Prism2 as was suggested on the Damn Small Linux Wikki and put in the proper SSID, Channel and WEP Key but there it still would not connect to the internet.
When I used Puppy Linux, it recognized my D-Link WIFI adapter right away but my computer didn't have enough ram to run Puppy with out it freezing or randomly closing an internet session when running from the cd.
I would like to get DSL up and running because I am tired of all the viruses that sneak in and mess up this old computer.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Please remember that I am new and am not even sure how to make a partition or Swap partition and many other terms I have been reading about.
Really need to know how to get DSL to recognize my WIFI Adapter.

If you like DSL, have you considered using DSL-N instead? It has a much newer kernel, which might make it easier to get wifi going. It isn't quite as lean as DSL, but it is comparable to Puppy.

I will give DSL-n a try, it won't hurt that's for sure. It's sometimes very hard for newbies to make the jump due to all the
hardware incompatibilities and when an advanced user suggests that we use "lspci" (just an example) we go "huh, what is that?"
I think as time goes, the more the distros become user friendly the more people will make the switch. I am willing to give things a try as best I can with my extremely limited knowledge. I really appreciate all suggestions and information.

Yes, that's true. You will find the more general purpose distros are a bit easier (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Debian), but the choice begins to narrow when you have less than 256Mb of memory.

I'm a little surprised you couldn't run Puppy reliably; 224Mb is still a reasonable amount of memory. Running off a CD does bog things down, because a CD is significantly slower than a hard drive, and it also means that some of the memory has to be reserved for a RAM drive (for things such as log files and so on).

you are probabley having one of three problems, wrong driver for card, card not setup correctly or not loaded, and /etc/resolv.conf not correct.
open xshell from a menu and type if you wireless card is listed with wep key then, probabley need to edit /etc/resolv.conf with correct nameserver. if card not listed then, at xshell if card is already setup will have a file called myiwconfig.
if file does'nt exist then your card isn't set up correctly. If myiwconfig file is there then open a root xshell and do the following
and see if your card is listed. post your results so can provide further help.
as for puppy verses dsl puppy, you will fine puppy easier to use in my opinion. To get puppy to work better will need to create a swap patitition with gparted.

Um

you know DSL/DSL-N are basically very outdated and no further development
also no Flashplayer available.

I think you should do a minimal lenny Debian net-install with light Desktop

Are you willing to check that out Messenger2?

You would have access to a huge amount of software via Debian repos and up-to-date software,etc

I can walk you thru it or you can install one of my premade distros
http://linux.softpedia.com/progMoreB...isX-31789.html

I put 503box-Chrome on my lappy, a 160mb RAM toshiba 7000ct 233mhz processor and it runs good

And sorry if I'm bumping an old topic here, but I was having Wifi problems too, (Not your card type, but wireless none the less,) and my step process looked like this:

Login in
Type in iwconfig (card dev name) essid (network name)
Then I had to edit /etc/network/interfaces, adding a line saying:
iface (card dev name) inet dhcp
Save
Then type ifup (card dev name).

Viola.