My wife's laptop recently was stolen, and the university will NOT
replace it because her Department has no money and she currently has no
open grants. I routinely install EL on all machines over which I have
any say; we need to replace her laptop as soon as possible so that we do
not have to share laptops. She only needs a browser, office suite, PDF
manipulation, and Thunderbird/Lightning -- she does not need a heavy
duty graphics/visualisation or development unit. (Firefox, OpenOffice,
Thunderbird/Lightning, VirtualBox running MS Win for MS Win specific
applications, etc., suffice for her needs.)
We have seen several discounted/sale/close-out laptops with dual layer
DVD burners, etc., of a size she will accept (smallish screen, low mass
unit). I insist on at least a battery that can be replaced without
disassembling the laptop, and a mains supply power plug that is
supported by iGo.
I have made a bootable DVD from the current standalone (no install)
bootable SL 6.1 IA-32 image (a bit larger than 2 Gbyte -- I do not
recall the exact file name but there were only two choices -- a smaller
one and the "full" one -- I chose full).
On none of the test machines did the 802.11 interface activate, nor is
there any sign of Gnome NetworkManager (I prefer NetworkManager for
end-user machines that must go to the field).
My intention was to use the SL 6.1 stand alone IA-32 as a way of testing
that all needed drivers are present in the "stock" image, as I know that
other than in those nations in which Microsoft has been found to be a
monopoly and meaningful remedies enforced, some IA-32 hardware only has
a MS Win driver, forcing the unpleasant use of NDIS (that I plan to avoid).
I could go back to the inventory of what is supplied on the image file
that I burned, but to save me time, does anyone know if the 802.11
drivers are part of that image? Is NetworkManager? Is the image
configured to connect automatically (including activating the 802.11
interface)? The DVD did boot, Gnome did come up, and the sound test
indicated that the sound interface was recognized -- but no 802.11 and
thus no Internet (via DHCP).
Any information or suggestions would be helpful.
Yasha Karant
