Newbie question: I just installed Mandrake 9.1 on an IBM ThinkPad 600X. Everything works fine except the network connection. I'm using an PCMCIA card: SMC 8041TX-CA 10/100. During boot the system beeps when it says it is loading pcmcia and based on a suggestion I saw on another post, I tried pcmcia restart and it looked like all was fine. When I go into the Mandrake configuration GUI and go through the GUI, eth0 does not even appear as an iten to be configured. Trying to use the wizard just puts me in a loop without being able to match a driver (apparently) and ends, confusingly, by saying that my network has been configured successfully. But still nothing works. Does this simple mean that I do not have the right driver, for my card? If so, does anybody know where I can find one? If not, what card can I buy today that is most likely to work?

At the command line, type dmesg | grep eth to see if your PCMCIA network card has been assigned.

It didn't find anything. It did seem to have a bunch of errors reported in the file, but mostly related to various drives:

I can't copy and the paste the output here as the computer with the problem has no network connection. What do you think I should try next?

It is possible that your PCMCIA network card may not be supported by the Linux kernel.

Do you mean that there is no driver, or that I just don't have the driver? How can I tell? What PCMCIA cards are supported or where should I look for a list?

There may be a driver, I just don't know where it is. Hardware is not my strong point.

You can find Hardware compatibility lists on your Linux distributions web site.

For example, this is Mandrake's Hardware list.
http://www.mandrake.com/en/hardware.php3