[tlinux-users:08699] Re: New User With A New Toshiba

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:39:10 -0600
John Randles <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Hi Stephe, I have the same laptop (A135-S4527) and am trying to load CentOS 5 on it. The live CD boots fine but the network drivers for the wireless card Atheros AR5006EG or the Ethernet adapter Realtek RTL8101 dont come bundled with RHEL 5. When I figure it all out I'll get back to you.
> It looks like I'll have to install madwifi for the wireless card, ndis 1.48 and find Realtek drivers for the ethernet card. Its not a trivial task, but I have only started about a week ago. Does anyone have any tips ? 
>  

and

> John> Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:05:25 -0300>> 

However, I'm having trouble finding drivers for my Toshiba Satellite > A135 S4527. The Toshiba Website doesn't seem have nay Linux support > for a Satellite Model later than A75 . . . Do any of you users out > there know if any of the satellite models A75 or lower will have > drivers that will work on my machine?> > 

Stephe Blake> > 


Stephe and John

You both may be making things harder for yourself than you need to.


First, it's entirely possible to dip toe in water before diving in.  There are several bootable-CD flavors of linux out there (a couple were already mentioned).  These invariably either leave your hard drive alone entirely (so you don't need to commit without ability to look back) or they put a 'save' file in your regular file system.  I particularly like Puppy linux; v3 is out now.  It has good ethernet and wifi support now.  You don't need to play with ndis, madwifi and the like any more.    Puppy will not save to hard drive unless you expressly tell it to in the shutdown sequence.  
      Puppy is particularly useful for last year's laptop  because of its small footprint in several dimensions (disk size, applications collection, etc).  I use a USB stick that I've installed Puppy to, plus all my class notes on an older laptop for which the hard drive controller has failed.  And I run Puppy on an old Sony laptop with 128M of RAM).


Second, most of the mainstream Linux distributions are pretty adaptable and increasingly mature.  I run Redhat Fedora (current version is 7) on a couple of higher-horsepower machines, including my Toshiba mastodon.  Most distributions can probe your hardware and install a servicable set of modules to match (in Linux we don't call them drivers like in Windows; modules is the right term.  From a terminal window, type lsmod (list the modules) to see what's installed.).






-- 
b