My wife's laptop recently was stolen, and the university will NOT 
replace it because her Department has no money and she currently has no 
open grants.  I routinely install EL on all machines over which I have 
any say; we need to replace her laptop as soon as possible so that we do 
not have to share laptops.  She only needs a browser, office suite, PDF 
manipulation, and Thunderbird/Lightning -- she does not need a heavy 
duty graphics/visualisation or development unit.  (Firefox, OpenOffice, 
Thunderbird/Lightning, VirtualBox running MS Win for MS Win specific 
applications, etc., suffice for her needs.)

We have seen several discounted/sale/close-out laptops with dual layer 
DVD burners, etc., of a size she will accept (smallish screen, low mass 
unit).  I insist on at least a battery that can be replaced without 
disassembling the laptop, and a mains supply power plug that is 
supported by iGo.

I have made a bootable DVD from the current standalone (no install) 
bootable SL 6.1 IA-32 image (a bit larger than 2 Gbyte -- I do not 
recall the exact file name but there were only two choices -- a smaller 
one and the "full" one -- I chose full).

On none of the test machines did the 802.11 interface activate, nor is 
there any sign of Gnome NetworkManager (I prefer NetworkManager for 
end-user machines that must go to the field).

My intention was to use the SL 6.1 stand alone IA-32 as a way of testing 
that all needed drivers are present in the "stock" image, as I know that 
other than in those nations in which Microsoft has been found to be a 
monopoly and meaningful remedies enforced, some IA-32 hardware only has 
a MS Win driver, forcing the unpleasant use of NDIS (that I plan to avoid).

I could go back to the inventory of what is supplied on the image file 
that I burned, but to save me time, does anyone know if the 802.11 
drivers are part of that image?  Is NetworkManager?  Is the image 
configured to connect automatically (including activating the 802.11 
interface)?  The DVD did boot, Gnome did come up, and the sound test 
indicated that the sound interface was recognized -- but no 802.11 and 
thus no Internet (via DHCP).

Any information or suggestions would be helpful.

Yasha Karant