ok, here's my problem.. a little while ago a good friend gave me his old dell inspiron 5500 and it used to have windows XP on it (important info) and the network jack is busted but I was still able to hook up on the internet using a Linksys pcmcia network card. The hard drive eventually gave up it's ghost so I had to use one from another old laptop that I had at the time. I have installed various linux distros and kept running into the same problem: I just not able to configure the network settings for the pcmcia card and it just refuses to recognize a connection to the internet router. It seems to recognize the card itself tho. It worked well with windows. Is this a common driver/linux bug or am I missing something there? Is there a workaround? someone please help me..?

Some more information would help.
What distribution are you using at this time?
What is the output of 'lspcmcia'?
What is the output of 'ifconfig -a'?

My first thought is that the onboard network is being recognised and being assigned to eth0. The PCMCIA card may be being recognised as eth1. Maybe you can turn off the onboard network in the BIOS.

This is an old document that may be of use.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO...WTO.html#ss3.1