thelinuxlink.net

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with a 2.8 GHz Mobile P4 and 1GB of RAM. I'm looking for a good Linux distro to install on it. But I have few concerns. First and foremost I want to still be able to use my wireless card? Most of the live CDs I've tried on it will recognize everything but the wireless card. Second, I would like to still be able to monitor my battery life. And lastly if I can get the wireless card running with a distro, is there a way to monitor the strength of the signal? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

just get the windoze wireless card driver, load up ndiswrapper, and you'r good to go. google ndiswrapper if you don't know how to use it. Most livecd's I've seen have ndiswrapper support.

OK but what about monitoring battery life?

Slackware works fantastically well on my Dell 700m. internal wifi, WPA, 1280x800 widescreen resolution, battery life monitor, CPU scaling, sound, 3D with DRI, all works perfectly.