Ok, so I have tried this with ubuntu, slackware and now im trying gentoo. gentoo was the distro that installed the cards correctly, im booting from the minimal boot cd but can't communicate with the out side world though either wireless or ethernet card dhcp wasnt working so i manually set the ip address and the default gw with route ifconfig shows all the right things though iwconfig says no wireless extensions for any of the connections despite eth1 being a wireless card.


so I believe the cards are installed and work properly, but I can't ping anyone packets sent 0 recieved the light on the card is flashing and the corresponding light on the hub so they are being sent.

If anyone could help that would be great, a laptop without networks is a bit pointless.

A simple lspci doesn't mean that things are installed correctly. It's just showing that your computer detects them. For the liveCD, I don't know how many of the kernel options are enabled. I think your best bet is to try the full liveCD, rather than the minimal. Here's a few tips if you get the networking up on the liveCD

For the ethernet support in the kernel when setting up your kernel, look under device drivers/Network Device Support/Ethernet (1000Mbit). The one you need for that card is the SysKonnect Yukon2 support. It's there in my kernel menuconfig (2.6.16), if not in yours, you probably need to get a newer kernel. gentoo-sources has always been good to me.

For the wireless, there's a very easy gentoo package, called ipw2200. you can install it once you have the gentoo system installed using "emerge ipw2200". I don't know if you can modprobe it or anything from a liveCD.

good luck.

thankyou from the reply ill try as soon as the live cd is down