[TriLUG] Thinkpad saga

[Rick DeNatale]

I'm still trying to get this old Thinkpad in a usable state.

I have FC3 installed. Yesterday, after adding memory (thanks Jason) I
decided to get serious and gave myself two tasks, update it and get
wireless working.  I plugged in a wired ethernet card and found that
it worked fine.  Initial attempts to get any of the wireless cards I
have lying around to work were fruitless.  I've got two "modern"
802.11 cards, one of which has the TI ACX 111 chipset, the other has
the Atheros AR5212.  Picking the latter it seems that I want the
madwifi package which I don't have.

But first, I decided to at least bring the machine up to date.  I
imported the gpg keys for fedora into RPM and ran yum to check for and
then install updates.

There were somewhere north of 200 packages to be updated.  After
cranking for several hours, it seemed to run out of disk space.  Then
when I restarted, I got the message that X was respawning too fast. I
brought it up in single user mode, and discovered that the yum update
had left me with a broken X installation, and no doubt other bad
things as well.

So I guess it's time to reinstall the system.

I recall a conversation in the mailing list not too long ago in which
it was mentioned/opined that one Linux distro (duck <G>) had better
support for wi-fi, but I can't seem to dredge it up via a gmail
search.  Am I dreaming this?

Alternately, is there somewhere where I can find install cd images for
FC3 with more recent maintenance applied, or a way to  update the
system in a way that doesn't require it to eat the whole wad at once?