Damn Small Linux on This Old PC

I recently borrowed an oldish LCD monitor for This Old PC, since its old Gateway monitor is at the office, hooked up to the now-brainless Thin Puppy, and a try of Puppy with the new monitor didn't produce quite the crisp resolution I'm seeking with such a "high-end" screen.

So I popped in Damn Small Linux 3.2, and I was pleasantly surprised to have an EXTREMELY crisp resolution on the LCD, with sound (from the troublesome ISA sound card that Puppy can't find) present on booting. Now the big beef I've had with Damn Small Linux (DSL for short, not to be confused with the DSL that the other 99.999 percent of the population knows) is its inability to find the onboard Ethernet in the newish Dell at the Daily News. But it sure found the cheap ($1.99) Airlink 10/100 Ethernet card I got from Fry's some time ago.

In case you don't know, This Old PC is, indeed about nine years old, with a Pentium II MMX 333 MHz processor, 262 MB RAM (yes, it's not a round number -- I have three different kinds of RAM in there, and something's fishy). DSL runs great on it. And since the screen looks so good, it's a computing environment I could really get used to. ... If only the printer and Wi-Fi were working. I'm not above getting another Wi-Fi adapter, especially one that works through USB so I could use it on multiple machines.

I had DHCP networking running, but since I don't have any wired Internet in The Back Room, all I could do was configure my router.

DSL, like Puppy, couldn't find my wireless card -- but since Windows 2000 has "lost" it recently, I won't hold that against it for now.

I tried, again, the screwy printer-configuration program that comes with DSL, and again I had no luck. The "test" page just shoots out every page in the printer, and when I try to print something normal, I get nothing. So at the moment, Puppy and DSL are neck and neck. DSL looks better on screen, but Puppy can actually print. I'll have to hit the DSL forums and see some solutions for printing and wireless.

And I'm not above getting a different, cheap Wi-Fi adapter, preferably one that runs through USB so I could swap it into the many test computers I have going at the moment.

Note: DSL-n, the bigger version of DSL with different apps and a newer Linux kernel does work with the newish Dell, so at least I've got that covered.