Old Laptop

[RedFox5]

I have an 8-year-old AST Ascentia M Series laptop with a 3 gigabyte Hard Drive and a Pentium 1 processor. It currently runs a Damn Small Linux distro from a year or two ago. However, I cannot use the USB drives, access the Internet, or even print. My current computer, a Mac, is slowly falling to pieces, and I hope to use the Linux laptop once it completely dead. Should I try a new distro or use some sort of code to use my wi-fi card and/or USB drive?

Note: I've tried to use hotplug (the usb manager included with DSL), but could not figure out how to get the wi-fi card to work (I have not really done much with the external card yet).

Edit: I read some more posts, and realized that I may not be using a wireless card at all. I am using an external "Network Adapter." It is called a "Linksys Wireless USB Network Adapter Instant Wireless Series." When I plug it in, the LED for "Power" goes on, but "lspci" does not make it show up. I'll look some more.

Edit 2: I tried "lsusb" as well. I got:

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 077b:2219 Linksys

Apparently, the USB drive works and recognizes the adapter. However, I still can't access the Internet. I'll keep looking.

Edit 3: I learned about Ndiswrapper and the other problems surrounding that. However, with my USB ports not mounting flash drives, I can't really transfer Ndiswrapper to the AST. Any ideas?

Edit 4: I tried "dmesg" with a flash drive plugged in, and it gave me a long string of output, ending with:

USB Mass Storage device found at 3
USB Mass Storage support registered.

It also gave me:

Initalizing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage Devices
Vendor: SanDisk Model: Cruzer Micro Rev: 0.3
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

Sounds hopeful, but I still can't find the drive.

Edit 5: Amazing. All along, there was a "Mount Tool" which was a GUI mounting program. Now the USB drive can be accessed from the folder "sda1". Finally, I can install some programs and get files off. Internet would be nice though. Still stuck on that front.

[darkrose0510]

USB wireless adapters tend to be somewhat of a nightmare in Linux, you would probably find it easier if you were to get a PCMCIA wireless card (assuming your laptop has PCMCIA)... have a look HERE for supported PCMCIA wireless cards, you might also like to look at The Linux Emporium who sell Linux compatible hardware - including some USB wireless adapters if you don't have PCMCIA.

Of course if you can use wired ethernet that would be even easier, just get an ethernet card and off you go.

If/when you manage to get on the net, I think there's actually a USB mounter you can install through myDSL which will automount your usb stick.