Having read that some distributions support the NetGear card out of the box (so to speak), I thought I would look at Fedora and OpenSUSE. Fedora is a community project supported by Red Hat and OpenSUSE is Novell's equivalent. Before this, I tried every GNU/Linux CD in my possession - and I have a fair few - but the CD-ROM would not recognise any of them. I wrote to Ubuntu and obtained a pressed CD - that booted but then hung after a while.

Fedora has a six-floppy method of doing a network install but one image proved to be defective. I tried repeatedly but the sixth image just wouldn't continue the good work of the first five. One option gone. After that I looked at OpenSUSE - the only way of doing a network install that I could find was by using a small image on a CD. Despite the behaviour of the CD-ROM drive, I decided to take a chance.

After burning the image, I popped the CD into the drive and closed my eyes. Wonder, of wonders, it booted. But obstacles were not far off- the process went as far as downloading the needed files for a basic install. Then I saw a message on-screen indicating that the laptop had insufficient memory for loading the installation program. Yast, or Yet Another Set-up Tool, the well-known SUSE app, needed more than 256 meg of RAM to run.

I restarted the process after having first made a swap partition on the hard drive. Once again, miraculously, the OpenSUSE CD image was recognised and booted. This time Yast recognised the swap space. Things progressed and the installation program finally indicated that a total of 2.1 GB of software would need to be downloaded. The downloading started but then the tiredness factor - I had slept a total of nine hours over the previous three days - kicked in and contributed its quota of trouble. I decided to sleep for a while and, as I normally do before going to bed, powered down my own PC, the very same machine that was providing an IP address to the laptop via DHCP. Next morning, I realised my stupidity.

By now, a deadline was looming. In a couple of days I would be due for an operation which would again put me in bed for a week or so. I was determined not to be without a laptop running GNU/Linux this time. I tried to boot the laptop with the same CD again, but it would not fire up. I then burnt a fresh CD and tried. This time it booted up and I was able to go through the installation without any of the earlier problems. It has become longer and more painful than it once was - at least then it was slow but efficient.