Progress:

After hashing it out with last night, I decided to try the full-blown Ubuntu install on the laptop. While it’s big, and takes up a lot of hard drive space, either Gnome or KDE are going to be the only window managers that will make this install user-friendly enough to be used by non-Linux geekasaurz0rz0rz0rz. So, full-blown Ubuntu it is.

The install took FOREVER, but it installed in a stable fashion the first time. It takes a while to boot, but is quick and responsive once it’s booted. So, the installation of the OS is a success!

However, there are still no wireless drivers. So, I have installed the ndiswrapper pages and obtained the proper windows .inf driver file. I copied it from my desktop onto a floppy, slide the floppy into the Presario, attempt to mount the floppy, and uh… no. It seems that none of the floppies I have will mount, which means that it’s likely a problem between Ubuntu and the floppy drive itself.

I’ve never had any problems with the floppy drive under Windows, so I’m guessing this is another instance of tweak or get tweaked.

Once I figure out the floppy problem and get the wireless card working under ndiswrapper, only the following tasks remain:

Getting the ancient sound card recognized and functional.
Installing codecs for “non-free” things like mp3 and streaming video.

I think this is as far as I’ve ever gotten in a Linux install without flipping out and going back to Windows. :)