Previously I’ve mentioned my appreciation for both Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, both fairly cute LiveCD versions of Linux. The problem is that Damn Small Linux can be just a little bit too small, and Knoppix can be a bit slow to boot, and can seem a bit bloated. Enter SLAX, a LiveCD which is designed to fit on those little 8cm CD blanks that can hold around 185 megabytes. I tried it out this weekend, and it seemed great: slick, fast to boot, has all the stuff I needed except for one: it doesn’t seem to detect any wireless card that I have for my laptop.
I currently have:
- A Belkin F5D7010 802.11g card
- A Belkin F5D6020 802.11b card
- A Dell Truemobile 1150 802.11b card
Neither Belkin card autodetects. For some reason, when the Dell card is inserted, it locks up my machine (all three cards work just fine in Windows). Anyone have any clue what the deal is for setting up wireless in Slax?
Oh, and my laptop seems to run significantly hotter when running Linux. Any clues as to what I could do ACPI wise to make it run cooler?
I do not own any PCMCIA wireless cards, so I have never had to configure any to work with Linux. The Belkin F5D7010 seems to use a Broadcom chipset; the Dell Truemobile is probably the same. while there is no official Linux support, you might have success with ndiswrapper; I was able to get my Dell 1350 MiniPCI card working in Gentoo. It might be easier to use the Belkin F5D6020, since it seems to use the Atmel chipset. This page claims to help you configure it in Slackware; I am not sure how good it is.
As for ACPI, you could change the CPU frequency settings; how much this helps is likely to depend on what processor your laptop has. In Linux, frequency scaling is *much* more customizable in Windows. For example, both my Dell laptop (which has a Prescott Pentium 4, probably the hottest processor ever made) and my IBM Thinkpad (Sonoma-based Pentium M) ran cooler in Linux after I tweaked the frequency settings, disabled unused peripherals, etc.