[Glastonbury] new to linux

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 09:10:43PM +0000, ROY MONAGHAN wrote:
> Dear all
>  
>  I am new to Linux, I have installed on my laptop RED-Hat 8.0 the problem
>  that I am having is hard ware related.First network I use a WI Fi system
>  on XP but it does not work on Linux,
WiFi cards are a nuisance at the moment - in the same way as you
once needed different drivers for every CD drive or massively different
kernel configurations for each sound card. The situation will probably
improve.

The principal problem is that most cards do not contain the
software they need to initialise the card - so you have to download a
device driver which has the firmware for the card as a large "blob"
of code. The device driver contains a large amount of code
essential to make the device work. It is also hard to find out which
chipset you have - for one card, the model number stayed the same while
it went through several different, mutually incompatible chipsets.

One solution is the (commercial) package from Linuxant - free for 30
days, $20 thereafter - which allows you to use the Windows drivers
supplied with your card and will work with virtually all cards.

A free alternative which does the same thing is ndiswrapper.  If you
Google for "ndiswrapper <card name/type> Linux driver" you should get
close to finding the answer. One problem is that RH 8.0 is now fairly
old - at the time when it was released, there was patchy support for
WiFi.

>  modems is an other problem.Is there a list of hard ware that is compatible 
>  with Linux?? or is there a way of configuration.

If this is a laptop, chances are that it's one of two or three chipsets:
primarily the Lucent modems.  Google for "<your laptop model number>
modem Linux".  This may mean compiling a kernel module or a full kernel.

Again, one of the problems is that RH 8.0 is fairly old.  You could try
using a Knoppix live CD disk to see what that reports as it boots and
use that to help you get further on this.

HTH,

Andy