Installing on ancient laptop with no Ethernet port?

[rebbi]

Hi, Guys,

I have been having fun figuring out what distro might best bring this ancient HP laptop (433 MHz Celeron with about 160 MB RAM) back to life. Puppy works but is rather quirky to install and seems prone to kernel panics for no reason that I can figure out.    Antix is quite nice, especially using Fluxbox as the WM, but it's still a tad slow on this machine.

I think that Tiny Core may be the ticket for me, but I cannot figure out how to get this set up because all I have for networking is a D-Link (Atheros-based) PCMCIA wireless card. The laptop is so old that it has no Ethernet port.

The Wiki seems to suggest that given the version of the kernel TC uses, there's no native Atheros support and I'd still have to compile Madwifi. I thought of trying to get the Madwifi stuff onto the laptop via a USB thumb drive, but apparently I still need some files from the TC repo in order to get compiling going, is that correct?

Anyway, if somebody can give me a walkthrough on how to do this, or at least put me out of my misery and tell me it's not possible, I'd appreciate it. By the way, I'm not a Linux newbie, but I'm not the most technical user, either, so be gentle.   

[nickispeaki]

what a problem?
do you have a hdd? and access to pc with internet?
just download all faq, tces, tczs, read (yes, sometimes i don't like it too.... english is not my native lang..) and install!

i'm in deep questioning about cyrilic support ....  And when i shell solved this question i'll write faq about to install all you need to work.

Good luck, man!

[^thehatsrule^]

You could use the extension.  This may help: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1163.msg6647#msg6647

Yes, you can save the extensions to your usb drive.

[rebbi]

You could use the extension.  This may help: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1163.msg6647#msg6647

Yes, you can save the extensions to your usb drive.

Okay, great! But where can you download the wireless_tools file?

[Juanito]

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/tce/wireless_tools.tcel

[rebbi]

Just wanted to note that I picked up an inexpensive PCMCIA Ethernet card and Tiny Core 1.3 recognized it perfectly, so now I can perform an install with no added complications!

[captainpotato]

Another way (not for you necessarily, but for others reading this thread) is to simply remove the hard drive, then copy the files over that you want. My Libretto doesn't have built in networking, CDROM or floppy drive, so it was the only way I could install onto it. Once I worked out (well, mainly Roberts) the correct boot codes, no problem whatsoever.