I need some help. I have an old sony vaio running winxp and slack-11. It has 250mb of ram and the AMD K6-3 550MHZ. I want to do a minimun installation of slackware 12 with flux. I haven't been able to find any information as to how to go about it for slack-12. Also, I would like to purchase a wireless card for this unit any recommendations for a card? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This recent post may help you in this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...wnload-615828/

From what I gather, you only need the first two CD's for a minimal installation of Slackware 12 on your system. The majority of the third disc appears to be for KDE. I'm not certain where fluxbox is located, as I currently don't have access to the package list for the CD's. Sorry, I cannot offer any advice for a wireless card, as I don't have much practical experience in this area.

Hi,
You should look at 'Slackware® 12.0 USB_Install' By Alien_Bob.

Or the 'Minimal System' Wiki method as to what packages you should install to have a base system.

edit: mini ISO image about 40 MB to allow a NFS install.

What's wrong with your Slackware 11?

You should search the HCL or LQ for the wireless card.

These links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links' .

I've had consistently good success using Ralink ra2500-based PCI cards.
They're available from a variety of vendors.
The legacy drivers from serialmonkey perform better for me than the rt2x00 project drivers, your mileage may vary.

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads

For a minimal system, well just pick the packages you want. For example don't install kde if you don't want to use it.

For wireless cards, here's a listing of cards and their level of support or lack thereof:
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

Typically Atheros based cards are the most well supported and functional under Linux. There are others like Prism based ones that are also well supported. Remember it's the chipset that matters not the brand name.

You should be able to install Slackware 12.0 on that system but don't expect great preformance with only 550MHZ clock speed.

You might want to use Opera instead of Firefox for browsing.

and don't use a heavy window manager like KDe/Gnome.

Also, make sure you keep 512 MB of swap disk space. To get best performance, recompile the kernel to a minimum. I think you will get pretty good performance. There are a number of threads on this forum regarding how to speed up the slackware install.

Hi,
Why do you suggest the compile of the kernel? You won't get a performance gain by a new kernel compile. You will get a very small gain for the boot but that is negligible.

As for a Desktop, I would suggest XFCE for the laptop. The K6-550 will be usable, good processor with that much ram should perform well.

Thanks guys for all the info/help. I did install slackware 12 but only install the sets that the instructions recommended like A, AP, etc... but didn't install KDE. I have also installed kernel-generic-2.6.21.5, kernel-modules-2.6.21.5 and kernel-headers-2.6.21.5. After I got this kernel working by modifying the lilo.conf file, I removed the other kernels from the system. Everything seems to be OK at the moment. I just need to go out there and get my self a wireless card. So, far so good. I'm kind of reluctant about deleting anything from the laptop. So, I'm not going to delete anything at this moment since I don't want to break my working system. I have notice, in the past, that when things break they can be a real pain in the ass to fix. So, thanks gain for your help.