I got an old laptop from my dad-in-law: it's a Compaq 1714ea, pentium III-1 GHz, 256 MB Ram, 20 GB HD.
It was configured with win xp and a wireless pcmcia card from sitecom wl-170. This configuration worked, but I wanted to make this a complete linux computer. I used to work with SuSe 8.0 a few years ago, which installed nicely but had no wireless support whatsoever. So I downloaded a few distros and tried them. My experiences so far:

Fedora 7: sees the wireless card but identifies it as an ethernet instead of a wireless card.

Mandriva 2007 spring: the card is automatically installed and worked fine, only thing was that the computer crashed frequently. Some other forum said it could be KDE, but I couldnt find a Gnome version of Mandriva yet.

Sabayon 3.5: only text version would install

SuSE 10 Enterprise: most stable of them all, so I would like wireless to work with this one.

Anyone suggestions, ideas how to get wireless to work ?

Your card has the ralink rt61 chipset according to http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_p...ndname=Sitecom

Therefore, follow the SUSE guide at http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=...For_RT61_cards
The driver installation and setup looks a bit involved, so good luck.

Sorry, made a mistake. Shoot me!
According to Sitecom, it's a Marvell chip, can't see the connection between Ralink & Marvell

The user posting at http://mandrivausers.org/lofiversion...hp/t39846.html contacted Sitecom and confirmed that the card does use a ralink chipset, and managed to get it working using ndiswrapper. I've checked the card's datasheet and it does say Marvell chipset, so I guess the datasheet is wrong.

Yesterday I switched to Mepis 7 and wireless worked out of the box. I tried to follow the instructions posted in the replies, but I didn't get suse enterprise working with wireless.

I found a Gnome based Mandriva too by the way, but I experienced the same instability as with KDE. I guess Mandriva doesn't work well with my Compaq laptop.

From here I want to thank the people for their time and effort to help me out.