My lenovo u350 laptop has vista installed. I'd like to use puppy on a flash drive on that laptop. Puppy 4.2 does not seem to be able to connect to the internet via my hardwire broadband connection. There are no modules in the connection wizard that seem appropriate to my ehternet card. In the Vista 'drivers' folder under Broadcom ethernet driver are the following files in a folder called 'Linux'

tg3-3.98f.tar.gz
tg3-3.98f-1.src.rpm
tg3-3.99d.tar.gz
tg3-3.99d-1.src.rpm
tg3_sup-3.98f-ISO.tar.gz

how do i determine which to use and how do i install / load it?

Are you sure that the issue is the driver?

Please paste here output of following commands:

dmesg | grep "`lspci | grep -i eth| cut -d " " -f1`"

ifconfig

ok so im properly thick here, but
i cant copy text from the terminal, how do i do that in puppy 5?

( dont seem to have an 'insert' key on my laptop!)

and..is that command dmesg.... a direct copy n paste job?

Triple click to highlight, then focus your terminal window and click both buttons simultaneously (or the middle button, if you have one) to paste.

you can redirect output to file then open with your editor also:

dmesg | grep "`lspci | grep -i eth| cut -d " " -f1`" >> /tmp/eth-info.txt
ifconfig >> /tmp/eth-info.txt