Recently tried a number of minimalist distros on my old laptop - Dell Inspiron 3500 - Puppy / pared down Ubuntu and Kubuntu ...

DSL installed onto the hard drive with no problems.

However, I can't connect via the wireless LAN AP card.

Have tried configuring through PCMCIA tool and Cardconfig and any button that looked vaguely related in Control Panel.

Under the system settings DSL sees the driver rt2400 but sees no internet card. Ndiswrapper won't do the do on auto - so this might be the way to go. But I don't know. Help please.

Best,

ZL

Welcome to LQ ZacharyLarkin!
Now, please give all info on your computer, ram, etc

also, there's a new DSL now, tinycore-2.1+
you should try that it's similar

others here will know specifically about your net issue

Just as a start can you post the output of
if the grep for mac80211 does not produce anything helpful you may want to just paste the output of lsmod. I believe that should be a start.

Inspiron 3500
Pentium II
cpu MHz 330.878
256 Kb cache
61884 total memory
(i686)

it's got 64mb ram?
or is that a typo?

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet iddr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:800 (800.0B) TX bytes:800 (800.0)

sorry: the list provided above is from command not gives an extensive list - I'm getting someone to read them out so I can type them in! so having an idea of what I'm looking for would be helpful. For example, from under I get: ??

please post the output of typing "free" in dsl terminal?
for memory

no typo.

wow, dsl runs ok on 64mb ram?

is a fair approximation!

no swap?
you need a swapfile or swap partition
dsl has a mneu entry to make a swapfile under "tools"

appears to - however, still in teething

how big should I make the partition?

should be 1/2 your ram, so at least 50mb maybe?
my partition on my pc is 400MB
I have 768mb ram