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It was suggested that I use a newer distro for more recent hardware (1997 
and beyond).  For support of USB and cardbus wireless.

So I am trying the Puppy Live CD on any laptops with at least 48MB RAM 
(because it won't run a graphical browser in less).

Puppy Linux worked fine on the 1.6GHz Compaq Presario R3000 with 256MB 
RAM.  No floppy disk to try BL.   I could try if from UBCD.

Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 series, 258MHz, 320MB RAM, with S2 savage IX/MV 
video, worked perfectly with BL2 (framebuffer kernel and Xfbdev) and my FB 
version of BL3.5 floppy, but not with Puppy because savage does not do 
Xvesa and the Xorg part is screwed up.  Puppy does not support framebuffer 
video.  To be fair, it does work from live CD with Xorg but they use some 
other wizard if you boot from hard drive, which fails miserably. 
Damnsmall linux works with Xfbdev.  Do any other small distros use it?

IBM Thinkpad 770M, 266MHz, which I upped to 212MB ECC RAM, works perfectly 
with BL3 but Puppy has some problem finding its files (on the CD - I even 
tried the boot floppy).  Xvesa works.  FB not supported.  BL3 floppy 
version works perfectly.  Trident Cyber9397 video 4MB video RAM. Damnsmall 
Linux works.

Winbook XLi, 300MHz, upped to 192MB RAM (non-ECC), boots Puppy Linux but 
the mouse does not work.  Win98 complains about an IRQ conflict between 
onboard pointing device and PS/2 port.  BL3 works perfectly with 
the PS/2 onboard trackpad and eraser-head mouse (I set it to use both).
Same video as the IBM, Xvesa but not FB.  Did not try DSL.

So far BL has worked in three computers where a distro (Puppy) designed 
for circa 300MHz computers has failed. (It did work in a Micron desktop).
I think it helps that things are less automated.  Maybe Puppy 2 (for older 
laptops) would do better?

I did not intentionally select laptops that do not work with Puppy.
In fact lots of people reported using Thinkpads with Puppy.  Winbook is 
supposed to be very linux compatible.

I have four other laptop computers with enough RAM to test with Puppy,
with USB and cardbus support.

DSL is not much better than BL at cardbus/wireless but supports my two 
working D-Link Xtreme-G cards.  (Not three other cards though).
Puppy supports all my cardbus and USB wireless cards in theory, but not on 
these three laptops since it won't boot on them.

The Gateway laptop is fixed (had corroded hard drive contacts) and I will 
use it (with BL and the wireless router we set up for the neighbor) to 
download kernel 2.4.37.5 and see if that fixes wireless cardbus (and maybe 
a later gcc if there is one that works with glibc 2.3.6 but not a later 
glibc because it needs kernel 2.6 which I hope to avoid for a while). 
Anyone have any better ideas how to increase the usability of my favorite 
non-buggy linux?

How do I set the Netgear router and the Aironet PCMCIA card to do WEP 
encryption?  I can no longer access 192.168.0.1 from the attached laptop - 
nothing happens at all if I give Firefox (on a Mac laptop) that URL. 
Before it set itself up for the internet I could run dhcp (between my 
laptop and the router - no broadband) and ping it and use a javascript 
browser with it.  The neighbors are afraid someone will use their wireless 
connection to download porn and they will get jailed. But they are happy 
not to need a 30' ethernet cable between cable modem and laptop now.

Do I use iwconfig to specify WEP?

Sindi