help with cd and pcmcia card

gearz

So I have an extremely old laptop (made in the late 90s) and I just installed Vector LInux Light on it. Sadly, there is no wireless internet already in the laptop, so I'm thinking about getting a PCMCIA wireless adapter card (btw, any suggestions on what type to get would also be helpful) and I'm not sure if I would need to install the PCMCIA with a cd or if Vector will automatically recognize it or if I have to do something else? This is my first time with linux so I'm completely lost.

Also, my cd-rom drive doesn't seem to recognize when I put cds in, is there a solution to this?

Thanks!

mfillpot

The pcmcia devices should e automatically recognized, the only question is if the wifi chipset is supported in the kernel of if you need to install drivers. if you can find a atheros based wifi card then it will be auto-recognized.

By default the cd-rom does not load all CDs, it requires additional packages to prompt the user when a disk is inserted, prompting you to mount it. I do not know the specifics of your distro so I do not know if that function is built in, but if it is not then you can try to mount the cdrom manually.

gearz

Thanks for all the help, but how do i mount the cdrom manually? Also, how do I install the drivers necessary without an internet connection?

marc

gearz wrote:

Thanks for all the help, but how do i mount the cdrom manually? Also, how do I install the drivers necessary without an internet connection?

Usually is something like

mount /dev/cdrom

Or if your distro hasn't set this up:

mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Beware that you'll need to be root for this to work

Regards