I picked up an old laptop from a coworker, which is a Pentium II - 266 MHz, with 64 MB RAM. This thing had Windows 2000 on it, and it's really struggling under the overhead.

So I want to put Debian etch on it, with a simple icewm or something light to keep resource usage low. But I'm running into a problem:

This laptop doesn't have ethernet!

It's got a PCMCIA, so I've been using a wireless card up until this point. But the card isn't recognized by the etch net install, and when I get to a shell during the install process, I never have a chance to compile drivers (or download kernel source, etc).

How can I install etch, hopefully without having to download 17 ISO images and burn 17 CD's?

What card do you have? Also, have you tried to install with linux26 at the boot prompt?

Belkin F5D7010. I think I've found source code for the driver online, but can't compile it as make and the kernel source isn't part of the debian net install base config.

Would I be able to do it if I just downloaded the ISO for disk 1 of the full installation? Would that give me enough of a system to compile the driver (note, I need the source as well).

Depends on what chipset it has. It looks like both rt2500-source and rt2400-source are available. You can get the kernel source and build the modules on another computer, then feed those modules to the installer. Or after the base install, install linux-headers, build-essential, and module-assistant
Here are the dependencies if you download them manually.

build-essential:
libc6-dev
libc-dev
gcc
g++
make
dpkg-dev


module-assistant:
perl
libtext-wrapi18n-perl
build-essential
dialog
whiptail
liblocale-gettext-perl