Lindows driver install

I know absolutely NOTHING about Linux. I mean nothing. A friend is running Linspire (Lindows?) and needs a USB WiFi adapter installed. This guy is an elderly dude and he can barely turn on his laptop, so he gave it to me to load these drivers. If it was Windows, I'd be done yesterday. I've attached the README file from the driver CD. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me. THANX!

 

Ok, so whats the issue?

The readme tells you how to compile and install it.

 

Yeah, I know the readme tells me how to compile and install it, but it doesn't tell me exactly what I'm supposed to do. What I mean is: in the "Build Instructions" section, it starts off with "1> $tar -xvzf RT73_Linux_STA......." and then there's line 2: "2> $cp Makefile.4 ./Makefile #". And so on thru line 7. What the heck is this stuff? Do I type it in somewhere like a command line? A text file or 'batch' file? How many spaces are in between the 4 and the ./Makefile? How many spaces between ./Makefile and the # ? Does it matter? Am I retarded?

 

Open up a console, such as konsole.

It will make a lot more sense, once you see how the command line layout is.

Bash uses >$ prompts for regular user accounts, ># for accounts with root priveledges.

Its wanting yo to go to the command line to work this stuff.

Are you sure you guys are ready for Linux? There is A LOT of command line work involved with the OS.

 

Funny you should mention that! The elderly owner didn't even know that he was running Linux. I explained it to him (which actually involved explaining what an operating system is and what an OS does) and he asked me to do what I thought would be best for him as an extreme noob, so I dumped the Linux and installed Windows. He would have run into MASSIVE headaches with Linux; ya know, I'm pretty experienced with WinXP but (like I said in 1st post) I know ZERO about Linux and if just installing a WiFi driver was confusing for me, for him it would have been the end of his PC career, so I thought Windows would at least get him online to swap emails with his grandkids, and to get photos from them and so on.... Thanx for your help though. I previously had no idea that Linux drivers had to be installed via a command line console; I also didn't know that Linux doesn't plug-n-play or even auto detect hardware (at least in this case with the USB adapter it didn't)... so this was still a learning experience, and that's what it's all about, isn't it?
Thanks again. Major Geeks is the best

 

Generally speaking, and despending on the distro, you can make it (with most things) with GUI stuff.

However, wireless (well most non-native driver support) is sheer hell on Linux and one of the more difficult things to setup. It was a lose-lose situation for him.

While I'm not a big fan of Windows--I think that was by far the best choice for him.