Wireless networking/Mepis/OS question

From: Randomthots (rodengelsman_at_ruraltel.net)
Date: 10/10/05 

Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:05:19 -0500

Group,
        Multi-part question. Preliminaries first: Trying to rehabilitate an
older laptop. Equipment is a Toshiba Satellite 1735. 700 MHz Celeron,
192 MB RAM (all I can put on it), new 40G hd. No network port built-in,
Linksys WPC54G v4 PCMCIA adapter (in hindsight not the best choice). I
inherited it and it had WinME on it and a failing hd.

        This is sort of a chicken/egg, horse/cart situation. In order to run
the network card I need to install ndiswrapper but most distros don't
include it on the install discs/iso. But I can't use the yum/apt tools
until I'm hooked to the Internet... So, I searched on Distrowatch and
found a short list of distros that include ndiswrapper. On the advice of
some folks on another list I chose Mepis cuz I'm sort of new at Linux. A
little heavy -- I'd prefer to avoid Gnome or KDE with this box, but the
main thing is just getting it working now.

        Anyway, installed Mepis and this is where it gets fun.

1. On bootup I get "You passed an undefined mode number. Press <RETURN>
to see video modes available, ...." I can let it sit there for 30
seconds, or I can press <SPACE> to get a list like 80x25, 80x50, etc..
It doesn't seem to matter much which one I pick ultimately because it
only affects the text scrolling by while booting up. Who's telling what
the wrong mode number and how do I fix it?

2. Also on boot it warns about not being able to allocate resource
region 4 of PCI device 0000:00:07.1. What's PCI device 0000:00:07.1? Is
this related to number 1? Do I have a bad video card or does
Debian/Mepis not know what to do with it?

3. I was able to get the wireless card working, but only in unsecured
mode. Even then it was weird and cranky. When I would log in as a user
or root -- didn't matter -- I would get 3 instances of KWiFiManager
telling me it couldn't find the network. HOWEVER, if I closed them out
and opened a browser I could connect to the outside world okay.
Sometimes KWFM would correctly report the state of the world if I later
opened it up again... sometimes not. No discernible pattern.

4. When I enabled WEP in the Mepis OS center the damn thing completely
locked up on me to the point that I had to do a hard reboot -- pull the
plug and battery. Now when it boots it goes into runlevel 3 instead of
5. It's hosed up so that I can't even start x from the command line. I
get "Fatal server error: no screens found".

At this point I don't really care what distro I use on it, although I am
more familiar with Fedora. I find Debian confusing, but that's just a
familiarity issue. I have to say, too, that I'm not really interested in
trying to compile kernel modules and such. If that's the right way to do
this then it will have to wait until I get more time.

Any suggestions or wisdom out there?

Rod

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