3 Newbie Questions

[Chad Davidson <cdavidson@ahastars.org>]

I just installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 and am very new to Linux.  I have
three questions that I hope will be easy to answer:

1.  I installed from my CD-ROM drive so my floppy was not used in the
installation.  When I mount a floppy disk, I can see the contents, but
if I try to open anything on the floppy (or even copy files to or from
it) my computer freezes.  Do I have something configured wrong or is my
floppy drive bad?  Is there some way I can unfreeze it?  (I tried
Ctrl-Alt-Del and Ctrl-Alt-F1.)

2.  I have 64 MB of RAM and a 450 MHz AMD K-6 processor.  I am using
KDE.  When I use the Task Manager (or free) to monitor how much RAM I am
using, I see that I am using about 56 MB of RAM when I have no
applications running.  If I try to open any application, it seems to run
very slowly (I assume because it is using swap RAM).  Is 64 MB of RAM
enough for basic operation (using KDE with StarOffice and GIMP)?  Is
there something I can do to speed things up?  Do I have KDE
misconfigured in such a way that it uses too much RAM?

3.  I now want to install a 3Com 905 10/100 NIC card.  How do I find out
the required software drivers/packages to install?  Are these packages
on my OpenLinux CD? (I hope so because I cannot get my floppy to work,
see #1 above)

Thanks,

Chad

--
Chad Davidson
Academy of Holy Angels
6600 Nicollet Ave. S.
Richfield, MN 55423-2498
cdavidson@ahastars.org
Phone:  612-798-2667
Fax:  612-798-2610