A newbie's progress

Earlier I posted about trying to get an IBM Thinkpad running a LiveCD distribution, and various kind souls on this board offered advice that was definitely a cut above the "RTFM" remarks that I feared I'd get.

I tried SLAX last night, and it came up, right enough. It mounted the local hard drive, and provided me a nifty KDE environment that worked pretty nicely. It also recognized the (admittedly penny-ante) sound card, and generally worked very nicely.

quite recognize the USB hard drive or the wireless network connector, and research on SLAX told me that the ZYDAS driver that comes with the distribution is for the 802.11b 1201 model, versus the 802.11g 1211 model I'm using. So I see myself getting the updated driver and putting it on the local hard drive, and then creating a script for post-boot compilation and installation of the driver, as well as including iwconfig commands to bring up the wireless connection.

The good part is that, once I get connected to the internet, I can get more immediate help on bringing up the portable hard drive.

The only other advice I would ask is for suggestions about a good lightweight graphical interface. KDE is very (as in VERY) nice, but when I hear the CD-ROM start chugging when I move the mouse, I get the impression that it may be overpowering the limited memory in my laptop.

Any suggestions?

John Gardner