November 8th, 2007 at 12:04 am
We have an old Gateway laptop that ran Windows 98SE. I installed Xubuntu, the lightest-weight of the friendly Ubuntu 7.10 series. It dual boots with Win98, but as soon as I get everything working, we’ll wipe out the Windows 98 partition.
The only trouble I’ve really had is getting the wireless networking card to work with the WPA security of our current wireless network. I’m not willing to downgrade the network. Linksys has Windows 2k and XP WPA drivers for the card, but none for Linux or Windows 98. There is a program called NDISWrapper that will make the Windows XP drivers work under Linux. So much for easy, but at least it’s doable.
The laptop has 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk. Firefox swaps the tar out of it. The mouse worked without any hacking this time.
After I get the wireless card running, my next trick will be to install WINE on it and see if it will run Microsoft Money. If that works, my final trick will be teaching it to the NRWife. I won’t use nearly the amount of technical jargon used in this post. 
November 8th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Good luck with WINE it seems to be hit or miss on what it will run. For me it runs Bibleworks great but can’t handle MS Office or Luther’s works. If you haven’t checked it out already winehq has a list of how well things run. I am still trying to hack my intellimouse in the full up Ubuntu.
November 8th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Thanks. I’ve tried to get the card to work this morning, but it hasn’t worked. It may be just too old. The NDISwrapper method didn’t work, even with extra drivers that I downloaded, and the card didn’t work on my WinXP laptop. I tried taking the security off the network, but that didn’t work either.
The ethernet works like a charm, so I may consider doing something else.
November 8th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Small nit to pick, its 7.10. The version indicates year and month of release. Hence, 7.4 came out in April 2007 and 7.10 in October 2007.
As to wireless, I’ve found grabbing a cheap PCMCIA/PCCARD 802.11 card off eBay to work pretty well. Check the Ubuntu wiki and/or forums to find out what chipsets are happy and go hunting. For a simple web-surfing laptop, 802.11b is plenty fast enough. Although, I’m not sure if WPA works on it. A USB 802.11 will work as well. But I find them to be a pain. they stick out too much for a living-room/couch laptop.
November 8th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Fixed, Gino, Thanks!