I have a Compaq Amarda 1530D You can see some info on it here: http://www.ciao.co.uk/Compaq_Armada_1530__5376706 I've got 1.2 Gigs of HDD space, and should I win an eBay bid, moving up to 20gigs, and 32Mb's of RAM. On the plus side I've got 2 PCIMA slots, one of which I want to use for a WiFi card. I've got a page on my site with it, http://thedarkplace.a0tu.com/electronics/laptop.html This is because I would love to use this laptop for War Driving, now is there a build of Linux that'd be a) good for a noob, b) fit on a 1.2 Gig HDD, c) support Wifi cards, and are there any particular cards to use, It'd be nice if I could attach my own Antennae. I'm willing to learn any command lines, etc to use, so it doesn't have to work out of the box, so to speak, but it'd be nice to have a simple guide to follow for my first attempt at Linux. Thanks, in advance.
A typical Linux thread, what distro to use... There is no correct answer to your question... a) There is a learning curve for everything, just like for Linux... Don't be scared to learn... b) 1,2GB is not that much, but plenty for small/lightweight distro's like DSL, LFS,... maybe Gentoo... c) Most 2.6 kernels support many Wifi cards... Best are the ones with a Prism or Atheros chipset. They have very good support. Look for a Cisco Aironet, it rocks Google around, there are plenty of sites that adress wardriving... The sticky at the top of this forum, written by me , has hopefully some good information for you, altough it is far from complete...
Thanks, I've found a few sites on war driving, and read up on DSL and DSL-N. Alas, yes, very generic Linux thread, but, looking at the debian, and gentu websites, they offer too many downloads, with no clear indication as to which is suitable for my system, nor any of my computers.
There has to be somany because there are somany different systems. You want to look for a package that has .386 in the name (you may not be able to run 586)
Much as I love Gentoo I don't think it'll work for you on that laptop I have installed it to a P90 with a 1.2G hard drive but its not something you want to do as a Linux noob. DSL would give you all you need, or at least give you a starting point. Also, check if the PCMCIA slots are Cardbus ones before splashing out on a WiFi card!
As AJB2K3, there are so much different systems... 32bit, 64bit, sparc,... The list goes on... As for install cd's, look for netinstalls or minimal installs... They are your best bet for a small and powerfull system. Full installs (like Ubuntu, Fedora,...) mostly install a lot of unneeded junk, which quickly fills up your small harddrive.
You could give the Debian netinstall a go - nice and small, just install what you need, and with a fast window manager (Fluxbox or XFCE perhaps) you'll be laughing. There are some good LiveCDs for this kind of thing (network security, etc) actually, I use Knoppix STD
If you want wardriving then you want to use the BackTrack distro from remote-exploit.org; the distro is geared toward wardriving/wifi auditing and supports atheros as well as many other wifi chipsets. For wifi auditing you will want to stick with an atheros based pcmcia card or another card compatible with packet injection while in monitor mode. For more information search their forums. I personally use BackTrack all the time and I think its one of the best; its a live CD as well so no HDD install required, but if you want it installed it has that option as well. Just be ready for that aforementioned learning curve.
I made a live CD of DSL and keep getting the error "The QEMU.EXE file is linked to missing export KERNAL32.DDL:Cancello." I may be the fact I've got 133Mhz, or 32mb of ram tho.
My first suggestion to anyone migrating to Linux is to visit LinuxISrg and check out the various distro home pages and forums. Use Slackware 10, Fedora Core 2, SUSE 9.1 pro, and even have Damn Small Linux installed and working well on an old machine.Also experiment with Mandrake 10 (many say this is the most "Windows Like") and Libranet. IMHO SUSE was the easiest to install, did the best job of recognizing my hardware and is easy to keep updated. http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=2 has both the SUSE live eval and personal edition for download. As Robert suggested, give the live eval a try, that way you can get a feel for the distro and will be able to see what hardware is detected, then if you like it install the personal edition. Hope this helps some, and whatever disro you choose, have fun
