You got most the answers I would recommend for the use of those laptops. Especially if you wanted to sell/give them away.

If you plan on using them in the house and you have other speedy computers handy I would consider using one or more of them as a thin client. I am working on doing this with an old desktop soon that is about the same speed. I am looking into using either no machine http://www.nomachine.com/ or the LTSP http://www.ltsp.org/

There are some drawbacks to tying a mobile computer to a fixed network but if you planed on using them as desktop replacements or mainly staying in the house it's an option.

Barring that I'd go with any XFCE distro. It has the best tradeoff between looks and speed.

Can you post the output of lsmod, for both the 2.4.x kernel and the 2.6.x kernel?

Make sure that the file /etc/rc.d/rc.udev is executable.

dmesg after you've booted into 2.6.x and the wireless card is inserted, and look for the name of your wireless card, any errors, eth, wifi,, the name of the module that should be loading for your wireless card.

But, since you're getting 2 network interfaces for 2.6.x, instead of just 1 for the 2.4.x, then you should run netconfig for the extra network interface that pops up in 2.6.x.--whichever one gets assigned to the wireless.

Hi

I have only just got a secondhand A22 and I have winXP on it with the standard load as/ the first post.

I'm amazed anyone one can insall Linux on one of these ;aptops at all. I have tied everything trying to get it to install. For some reason, I think because of the IBM pre-load, it can't seem to boot the disk. The Crow seems a little twitchy, as in it can't see the linux boot disk.

I have already partition the hd in some anticipation by using partition magic and have installed bootmajic.

Please can anyone help. I have been trying for over 2 weeks now. These laptops are so tuff and stubborn but will be great for college.


Does anyone know how to remove the pre-load too?

I have had good luck using the GParted Live CD to remove unwanted partitions, including the diagnostic partitions on Dell laptops and the preload partiton on several IBM and Lenovo laptops.

You can download an ISO image for GParted and you should then be able to boot from the GParted CD. It is very easy to use.

Bob

I was being a bit silly by not using the right software to burn the ISO image. I bought some more disc's this morning and burnt the image using Nero rather than the burning software that is built into my Vista desktop. To be truthful, I have not done any burning for several years so I was not up to speed on really how crap Vista is! That is relatively speaking, of course.

However, I still have not removed the IBM pre-install partition as of yet and, because, this is valuable space now I have mandrake installed and I want to experiment. Very shortly, I will try removing this horrible little partition but I would rather try and achieve this using Mandrake which I am learning how to use. Therefore, would it be easier to remove it in Mandrake? I am worried in-case I corrupt the main boot sector which now has the Linux information stored in as well. Until I get up to speed with Mandrake I am still "ball and chained" to XP on my laptop.

-----------------
VERIFY that your Microsoft restore/rescue disks have a "fixmbr" capacity. I found out the hard way that the system restore disks that came with my Sony Vaio desktop do not have that capacity, and they lie when they say that they will format the disk for you. Took a live CD (Knoppix) and Fdisk to fix things.

Thank you for the advice, although when I used Partition Magic from the XP Pt which is how I originally formatted the HD for dual-boot, I could not observe any difference except numerically! This was obviously my first sign that I had something nasty there. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I initially had a copy of Win2000Pro on the laptop when I imported it from the US, cheaper than buying over here in the UK. The main reason that I put XP on was because I lost the Win2000 partition and had to install another OS, as I could not install Mandranke at that time. However, when I tried using Boot Magic, I could see the pre-load partition and tried to delete it. To my annoyance it returned and I suppose it is still there, lurking.. What's on it, who knows, IBM poo? It's finding a of way of accessing that part of the drive/partition directly and removing it but, at the moment, I am stuck.

Thanks for this. After awhile with no luck I finally got tired and turned to Open SuSE 10.2... My wireless card was recognized immediately. I'm pretty happy with Open SuSE. Might return to Slack whenever they release a new version which runs a 2.6x kernel by default.

Congratulations! Too bad Slackware with 2.6.x didn't work for you, but that's what the huge selection of alternatives is for.