Dell Latitude D610

I got a Dell Latitude D610 Laptop from my friend I was running his windows XP for a while and then windows decided to give me the nice little blue screen of death because apparently the hard drive had bad sectors? Whatever so I replaced the hard drive with one that is only 60 GB so i now have to be very sparing of my HD space. I made 4 partitions. First partition (sda1) is a 9 GB ext 3 partition i devoted to Knoppix (Debian Install to HD) the next partition (sda2) is my 1GB swap partition for Knoppix, my 3rd partition (sda3) is a 15 GB ntfs partition that i will eventually put windows XP on when i find my CD. My last partition is a 30 GB FAT32 partition that I have devoted to sharing files between the two OS's (music, pictures, movies, documetns...)
Anyway know that you know my setup :D, heres by problem. I am new to linux but not too new to Unix because i have been running windows and mac os simultaneously for 10 years now, and I have a broadcom modem chipset which is apparently unsupported so I cant just go on the internet by plugging directly into my cable modem and my Intel wireless card chipset is not supported by default but there are drivers for it online. Also any time i try to run a program that requires root access i get an error "SU returned with an error" so I can't configure anything the way I want it to be.
My questions are:
1) If i download the drivers on a windows computer can i just transfer them to the linux laptop on a USB key and run them to get my wireless running?
2) Is the information I heard about my Broadcom chipset not being supported outdated if not how can I configure them to work? because I've tried plugging in directly and it hasn't worked.
3) How can i get programs to work that require root access to run?

Thanks,
Mat

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mattisz

I got a Dell Latitude D610 Laptop from my friend I was running his windows XP for a while and then windows decided to give me the nice little blue screen of death because apparently the hard drive had bad sectors? Whatever so I replaced the hard drive with one that is only 60 GB so i now have to be very sparing of my HD space. I made 4 partitions. First partition (sda1) is a 9 GB ext 3 partition i devoted to Knoppix (Debian Install to HD) the next partition (sda2) is my 1GB swap partition for Knoppix, my 3rd partition (sda3) is a 15 GB ntfs partition that i will eventually put windows XP on when i find my CD. My last partition is a 30 GB FAT32 partition that I have devoted to sharing files between the two OS's (music, pictures, movies, documetns...)
Anyway know that you know my setup :D, heres by problem. I am new to linux but not too new to Unix because i have been running windows and mac os simultaneously for 10 years now, and I have a broadcom modem chipset which is apparently unsupported so I cant just go on the internet by plugging directly into my cable modem and my Intel wireless card chipset is not supported by default but there are drivers for it online. Also any time i try to run a program that requires root access i get an error "SU returned with an error" so I can't configure anything the way I want it to be.
My questions are:
1) If i download the drivers on a windows computer can i just transfer them to the linux laptop on a USB key and run them to get my wireless running?
2) Is the information I heard about my Broadcom chipset not being supported outdated if not how can I configure them to work? because I've tried plugging in directly and it hasn't worked.
3) How can i get programs to work that require root access to run?

Thanks,
Mat

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I love knoppix live cd. It is great as a live CD. But for a harddisk installation, I would not recommend it. Lately I found Ubuntu, a variation from Debian, looks good to me and I did install more than one desktop using Ubuntu. You may consider it. The installation is very simple. Or select Debian is not a bad idea.

One thing you may need to know when you want to have Windows XP and Linux on the same machine. Install Windows first. If you try it the other way round, very likely windows will screw up your Linux installation. That's how you try to knock out your competitors right?

To install Linux, rule of thumb, 2 times of your RAM size swap disk. However, I found if you can afford it, put a little more on it. For example, I have 512 MB RAM, but I put 2G swap disk. (1 G more disk space is nothing nowaday, but it did help me when I try to install some test applications that require more RAM than I physically have. In that case, you swap disk becomes your memory. Well of course, it will be painfully slow cause the system will do a lot of swap in and swap out. But the bottom line is that you can install the application and test on it)

If you select Windows XP and Ubuntu as your system, you do not need to pre-partition the hard disk. When first install Windows XP, decide how much disk space you need for windows XP and leave the rest of the disk untouch.

Then when install Ubuntu, it will allow you to partition the left over disk space. And at the end of the Ubuntu installation, it will install the dual boot manager.

For the Dell D610 wireless on knoppix, I have successfully run it using ndiswrapper. (I am using the D610 also)

Check out the Q2, 3, 4 on the following link

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Network_FAQ

Good luck and have fun

Rgds,
Chip

Thanks. I have been given a D610 at work, so I can't install Linux to HD. I have been using DSL-N on it for a while, and most things work, although I am just starting out on Knoppix. Using the Live CD and USB stick work fine for me, although the multimedia applications seem to break when run from the CD. Overall, I am happy, and shall stick to Linux! :)