[Scottish] several linux problems

[Richard Wright]

Hi,

I've got a few problems I was wondering if anyone could help with?

The hardware is a toshiba laptop from 2000 with 1.2ghz, 512m ram, 20gb hdd, a dial up pci card and a lan card.
OS is slackware 11. The ctrl key doesn't work, so I'm sending it off to get fixed before I sort anything else.

1)Connecting to the internet

I've successfully installed linux a number of times now, but I'm not sure how to get it hooked up to the intenet.

There are several internet access points I can use:

a) A dial up connection at my parents home.

b) ADSL at the university (will probably require legit login ID)

c) A wi-fi connection in my flat from my neighbours. May be encrypted.

I do want to get internet access in my own flat, but BT want £120 from me first. Before I do that, I want to make sure I know how connect to the net.

2)Connection hardware
I'm also going to buy a new wi-fi card so I can use my laptop anywhere there is a wireless network, and I wondered if anyone knows of a good generic linux compatible wireless card that comes with required drivers if necessary. 

3)Kernel configuration
A lot of the hardware doesn't seem to register on linux. Specifically the internal dial up modem doesn't seem to register. This may be because the kernel is not properly configured.
I've had a go at kernel configuration, using a menu, but most of the options are not intuitively named. I'm looking at "the linux kernel" which is good theory, but it doesn't directly solve the problem at hand.

The priority is to connect to the internet. If I can do that, then a lot of other problems are more easily solved.

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