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I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop that someone just gave me, and I am wanting to install Linux on it.
I have installed linux many times, but this laptop is going to need a distro other than common distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Mandriva.
I have tried all of those distros, but none of them like my wires linksys card, the wpc54g.
I need a distro that will easily connect to our wpa network and have sufficient drivers to run my wifi card.
Thanks
Try Linux Mint 5.0 XFCE.
"If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions" - Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction
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See ndiswrapper.
"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10
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My only real complaint about Linux is the poor wireless support. I've literally struggled for days trying to get the wireless to work with some cards, even with ndiswrapper. It all comes down to the wireless chipset your card is based on. Right now, I have 3 different wireless PCI cards, all based on different chipsets - Atheros, Realtek, Marvell. The Atheros based card was the only one that was immediately recognized...all I had to do was config the settings (SSID & password) & it worked. The other two were major hassles.
I believe your card is based on a Broadcom chipset which is another one that's known to be difficult to configure. If you can't get it going with ndiswrapper, Linuxant might be worth a look:
http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/
"If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions" - Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction
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I've had good luck with the ralink chips, such as this card.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...
this card was recognized by 3 different distros I tried, "out of the box". One of them was puppy, which as you know is a small distro.larry
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Thanks for the tips, its nice to know which cards will work and which ones are not.
I have downloaded Linux Mint 5.0 XFCE, and I am really glad I did. It is by far the best distro that I have used.
It already has ndiswrapper installed, and Thunderbird instead of Evolution, which is a plus.
Thanks for the Mint tip, I am going to keep this distro.
Note: The EDIMAX wifi card is only for desktop computers, this is a laptop.
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puppy identified this card as atheros wlan0, out of the box, but I was unable to connect. (I got a $15, rebate on mine)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...One of the reviews claims ubuntu identified it. I have mint5, with the gnome desktop on a laptop at home, I'll try the card tonight, and post back tomorrow.
I'm running mint5 with the gnome desktop, on a P3 with 256mb, runs ok. I think, it would run ok on your machine, I would create a swap partition first. I want to try mint 5 with the Kde desktop, but its a big download, like 1.2 gigs. You have to use a dvd.larry
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Ok, thanks, I will be looking forward to your results so that I can decide if I need to get one.
Right now the laptop is running Mint 5, and it runs pretty well too.
Thanks again.
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tried he card in the laptop with mint 5. card detected my network and, several neighbors. But I was unable to connect , so I can not, recommend getting it.
larry
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