Will USB Lan and Sound be better supported in Linux than my Wireless PCMCIA and Sound
 

Hi, Newbie here :-)

(Just typed a long post about this, I pressed Submit, then I got a message that said i wasnt logged in.. I pressed the back button, but my typed message was already gone.. :-( oh well, guess ill have to type everything all over again... :-) )

Im trying to install Linux on an old laptop.. Dell Latitude CP, 266 mhz, 64 mb. Ive tried knoppix, Ubuntu, Debian and DSL.. not one can recognize my :

a) Onboard sound
b) Level One Wireless PCMICA card (fairly new.. I "borrowed" it from my Tablet PC)

Did some research, found one reference in Linuxonlaptops and Tuxmobil about the sound on Latitude CPs, but the answer there was a bit technical for me...

Then an idea occured to me... what if I use those USB Lan and USB sound devices? Thyre relatively cheap.. will those work? Are they better supported by Linux or not at all?

The laptop only had one usb port (1.1) but I have a usb hub.. that shouldnt be a problem is it?

Will Linux be able to detect 3 devices on the usb port (lan, sound and usb mouse)?

What distro can detect and support these "hardware" ?

Hope someone would be able to give an answer... or better yet, maybe suggest a way i can get my existing hardware to work :-)

Linux looks very promising to me... but i cant get sound and internet access on that old machine, its advantages would be sorely compromised... :-(

thanks for listening!

(saving this to a text file now before I send.. just in case... :-) )

Well, you could do that, but bailing out on your existing internal hardware to try and find external ones that will work better probably isn't the best attitude to have when attempting to learn a new OS.

That said, your chances with USB WLAN probably aren't much better than with the PCMCIA, though a USB sound device should work out of the box.

Your best bet would be to post a link to the "technical" bit about your internal sounda card, so that we could walk you through that and get it working properly.

In regards to the PCMCIA WLAN device, you should find what chipset it is using with the
command "lspci", and then Google that in relation to Linux. Unfortunately, with WiFi under Linux it is best to assume there are no native Linux drivers for it, unless you can find otherwise on Google. If that ends up being the case, you might need to use ndiswrapper; or in the truly worst case, use a different card.

Hi, thanks for the reply :-)

I did try to diligently search for solutions, but came up empty (so far). I even encountered a post that said the sound on this particular model was notoriously difficult to configure in linux. But i hear what you're saying.. i need to try more :-)

im still getting my feet wet with Linux, trying out diff distros.. so far the best ive tried seems to be DSL and Puppy. The thing is, I dont know HOW and WHERE to do type the command "lspci" in Linux. (each distro i tried seems to have a slightly different interface). I dont even know how to access the drives (hda1, hda2) yet... (Knoppix put these on the desktop, but it worked only on my PC but wont run in this slower laptop) Puppy is giving me a wide selection of drivers, and i read that using ndiswrapper, i can load the windows drivers (problem now is i dont know how to place this driver file in a place that i can access with linux.. but im still working on it and learning as i go along.)

As to using these USB devices.. since theyre so cheap here (about $6 each) i thought it just might be easier to go out and buy them. And I meant a USB LAN device, not wireless... like this one:http://cdrking.com/local/products/in...189253-8722910

which means ill be using a UTP cable to hook it up to my wireless router (also has wired lan ports).. not exactly an elegent solution i know but if it can give me internet access, what the hey...

BUT.. before i go out and buy it, ill try to exhaust all possibilities first..