Which linux?

I have an old Dell laptop, Celeron 2.4ghz, 256mb ram. And I need something to run on it, XP is horrible on it. And I am forced to use it till I get my insurance for my othernotebook.

So I was thinking, how would Fedora 8 run on it?
How hard would it be source drivers for a PCMCIA Dlink wireless adapter?

[Prometheum]

FC8 will probably run fine (though you may want to tone down any eye candy.... a lot). You might want to try Fluxbuntu or just use another Desktop Environment than GNOME or KDE (I don't know if Anaconda supports choosing the DE).

Go for a lightweight Desktop Environment like Fluxbox or Blackbox over something with lots of eye-candy like KDE or GNOME.

You'll probably be able to get drivers, by the way. It depends on the chipset of the card, but IME D-Link has been easy to manage.

[tonight.we.dine.in.hell]

you could probably get a stick of 512 ram for like 20$ and get full blown eye-candy, but without it i would go with debian or xubuntu, fedora usually uses all the brand new stuff

Fedora works quite well. Much faster than XP on it. So I'm happy with that.

However, (there is always a however aint it?) I cant get the system to recognise my wifi card Dlink DWL 650. So I dont have the internet at home. (Apartment offers only wireless networking, and I cant get anything else.)

Any advice on how I could get the wireless card to work?
Thanks.

[Prometheum]

Well, D-Link is the name of the brand, not the name of the chipset. Drivers are written for the wireless chipset, so D-Link isn't a name that you really need to know. Use the utility "lspcmcia" (list pcmcia) to see what the actual chipset of the card is, and then look on the fedora wiki or forums for how to get it to work.

Ok. Fedora works perfectly. Updating the kernel got my wireless to work... But now....

How do I select the network I want to connect to, like i could in XP/Vista?

Right now, I have one wireless connection. When I go home there will be MANY MANY MANY of them. How would I go about selecting the one I want?

[Prometheum]

Are you using gnome with network-manager? There should be a way to just select what network to connect to in a GUI, or you could also just go to whatever other way of configuring the wireless you have and set it up manually. I assume you know the access point you want to connect to.

Originally Posted by Prometheum

Are you using gnome with network-manager? There should be a way to just select what network to connect to in a GUI, or you could also just go to whatever other way of configuring the wireless you have and set it up manually. I assume you know the access point you want to connect to.

Yeah, got that working. I just had to start the service.

Anyway, I got a new problem...

I can connect to the right access point. But the fucking bastards want me to get on their VPN.

Everytime, I try to get Open VPN to work through NetworkManager, it dies on me. In a very strange and fucked up way.

When I enter the IP of the VPN, and the name for the VPN is entered it crashes, and vice-versa. So I cant get that to work, and if I try vpnc, it demands a secret password. My fucking ISP does not seem to know what that means, so I am fucked.

Any ideas?