Posting from Austrumi now.. Slick little distro. the interface looks very sharp.
Quite frankly it looks nicer than some mainstream distros out of the box .imho.

Love the memory reading.. 118 MB / 990 MB 11% : )

Now I have to find some old box to try this on.

Austrumi could not find the network card built in the laptop on which I tested it. Will have to put more time on it.

Astrumi worked fine on my laptop, with the exception of not being able to see the PCMCIA wireless card. I didn't have any graphics problems with it, I'll try later to see if it will work on my Dell desktop. The crash may have been a momentary glitch.

pcmcia wireless card would require additional support

pcmcia card services
pcmcia utilities

I'd be surprised if those were included in asutrumi by default due to the limited size of the distro.

My question is, where do you get these from? For example Netgear does not seem to have any drivers for Linux and only for Windows on their web site. Do you know who carries these drivers?

well you would start by doing lspcmcia that should show you WHAT wireless chip-set is on the card, (provided the PCMCIA support and utilities are installed in the OS)

Once you know what chip is on the card, you can locate the driver.. you need to get setup and working.

I also found out that ifconfig command did not work in Austrumi.

Thanks farslayer,

I'll try that lspmcia command in terminal mode and see what happens. I tried Dreamlinux and it worked very well on the laptop. It seems to indicate that it recognizes Windows pcmcia drivers, but my laptop is set up with a full install of fedora 9, because I'm using the Fedora 9 book to learn Linux and do not have Windows on the machine. I tried to see if I could install the Windows drivers, but the Dreamlinux live CD will not release the CD ROM once you've booted up with it, and fedora doesn't recognize the files on the pcmcia install disk.

Like I said earlier, the laptop is for experimenting (and I'm sure doing a LOT of that!) with Linux and I can get on line with it using the ethernet connection, so it's not a total but it would be nice if I could make the laptop fully wireless.

Thanks again, I'll try your suggestion.

Interesting, it works on mine.

You might wanna try TinyCore Linux-the guy who made mydsl,etc is behind it.
Check it out...

Neat Linux?
 

Turn a page fi seeking help, this post is one in the line of endless questions by long-time-no-see newbie user(s). I hanged on the topic title (regarding neat distributions), although the situation is slightly different.

In a position of an system administrative enthusiast I'm guarding the machines wellness in an "application" in which a second is higly important and valuable - 24/7 work, maybe less at the end but daily this outdated and fairly old (no exact specifications) computer must open loads of Internet pages and write documents.
Simplified: it's a radio studio machine, sitting there for the speakers orientation 'round news, diffferent texts, websurfing and other common / daily everybody-does-it tasks.

Linux powers the system with opensource, it is kept simple with Ubuntu and "embedded" software (Firefox, OpenOffice) - age makes footprints and things are getting slower.
What, by your opinion, is the best distribution for such a x86 PC? Keep in mind that handling is led by non-Linux users and it must be fast, simple, maybe even more Windows-like.

Thank you for advice.

With best regards,
BIG_Yack

RAM would be your main challenge. Most modern distros won't run well on anything less then 512MB.

For your purposes, any distro should work really. It all boils down to the windows manager & app choices. Like you experienced, apps like Firefox are bound to be slow. You just need to find reasonable lightweight alternatives to your usual apps. Such using Dillo or Midori instead of Firefox.

I believe it is not underfed in terms of RAM - but I will have to check the configuration, as I said.

It already was on the mind of other knowledge sources, but my opinion still stands; the amount of preinstalled, sometimes unnecessary, packages depends on distribution - expirience shows such behaviour in Ubuntu. What is the customizable distro?
And turn the spotlight to the other point of mine; is there any, simple, Linux clone of Windows?

Thank you.

Best regards,
BIG_Yack