I'm trying to breathe some life into an old 486 laptop. 8 MB ram, 500M hard drive, no CD-ROM, no USB, no sound. (It's a Thinkpad 345c). I'd like to get my DWL650+ working in it. I'm more a less a Linux newbie, but before I take the time to install Linux I need to know if this is doable, and if so, what distribution would be a good mini-distribution that would support the acx100 driver.

Any comments? Am I just dreaming? I gave up on getting it to work in Windows, by the way.

Thanks

The only distribution that any support for the acx100 is Mandrake 9.2. Mandrake 9.2 may work on your system but I would not recomend a GUI.

Also check out the acx100 project at www.sourceforge.net and the information at www.houseofcraig.com about getting the acx100 card to work with anything.

There was another thread related to that card; don't know if he ever got it working properly though. I would imagine you could do it with any distro you like, provided you can get ahold of the driver module. One of the more customizable distros like Slackware is probably more likely to lend itself to being installed on that hardware, especially given that there's no CD-Rom drive. You will in all likelihood have to install a minimal distro like SmallLinux or muLinux in order to get going, though; since you have no CD-Rom, you could get one of those running and then do a network install. Slackware could probably be installed via a huge pile of floppies, but a network install might be easier.

I had a similar experience that may help to guide you along in the process, if you can follow my ramblings With 8MB of RAM and 500MB hard drive, you'll even be able to install a fairly full suite of programs, and a GUI if you are so inclined.

Sorry I posted a wrong address it should be http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php

i have used vector linux on alot of 486's with great success, the card, however, is a very difficult one to make work... nice way to cut your teeth with linux!