Welcome Heather!
> I need to get non-proprietary wireless cards for the laptop and netbook
eventually
If you want to replace your wifi card (with a working one), I suggest you to
do the following:
Important: If your laptop uses a wifi+bluetooth combo card and you'll replace
it with a wifi-only card, you will loose the bluetooth functionality on your
system.
Go to the ath9k driver page and select a chip (or chipset) with the specs
that fits your needs
Search that chip (or chipset) on the WikiDevi Atheros page and click on the
link under the Reference designs category
In the right-bottom corner, you'll find a table with devices that uses the
selected chip (or chipset). Select one
Search for it using DealExtreme or AliExpress (or whatever site you prefer
for shopping) and buy it cheap, second-hand, from China (will costs you
around 10$)
After you disassembled your laptop and replaced the wireless card, sell the
old card on eBay (or whatever site you prefer for selling things). This way,
replacing the card will cost you almost nothing
> but I'm happy getting sound but no video from YouTube on the old gal
Note: With Midori (Trisquel-mini), YouTube videos didn't work very well
There are tons of ways you can get YouTube working. Some of them including:
Install Minitube: Download (amd64/i386)
If you're using Trisquel-mini, install Abrowser (Abrowser packaging is
currently broken in Trisquel 6.0 Toutatis, so currently there's no way to
install it correctly)
If you're using Abrowser, install Lightspark: Description
Go to the YouTube HTML5 page and click to Join the HTML5 Trial on the bottom
of the page
> Is there anything in particular that I could be doing to help as far as
testing?
I still need a confirmation from someone that Ruben (alias quidam, the
Trisquel project leader) is aware of the existence of this wiki page I
created (imagine my frustration after the final release when I find out that
my efforts were in vain just because he overlooked that page). If you have
used na IRC client before (Pidgin or XChat), you can contact quidam and send
the link to him. I would be grateful for that (sorry for asking such a dumb
favor, but I have no experience with using any IRC client).
Other than that, you can just use the RC (Release Candidate) and report any
issues you've found with the issue tracker system or by reporting it on the
already mentioned toutatis-development wiki page.
> I'm very pleasantly surprised by Mini and don't see any reason to switch
to Lubuntu, Puppy, or DSL, since this RC meets my modest needs just fine.
I doesn't like the way Ruben's trading this edition because it lacks many
basic features (like composition manager, screenshot tool, task manager,
keyboard layout switcher, search tool, bluetooth support, user managing,
screen saver, just to name a few), so I cannot recommend it without making
heavy optimizations. (GNU/)Linux Mint LXDE does not have these issues (but it
contains non-free software, so sadly there is no other choice).
