i have Mandrake 9 on the laptop and the connection works when i connect the cat5 wire into it but not with my trendware pcmcia card.
I used the wizard for both.
I really don't know anything about linux, i just installed it just to see if it'd work on my laptop. I need it for my CS major that starts at the end of august at VT.

edit: whoops, just checked Trend's website and my cards not on the compatible. So there would be no way in the world i could get this to work?

and another ?
I had XP home on this and with partition magic i made a linux partition and the boot drive before the NTFS. I installed mandrake and now it doesn't see XP anymore.

Will i have to format all to FAT then install XP and then Linux.

I did try to clean the laptop with the restoring disc which should have made it like the way it came but it still started up win mandrake

Trend is probably reselling a well supported chipset, to find out what's under the hood of the card:

/sbin/cardctl ident

Then post that back here.

Now... when Mandrake installed it should have seen XP and created a LILO stanza for it... if you are using LILO... check to see if the NTFS partition survived:

cfdisk /dev/hda

or... if cfdisk isn't there:

fdisk /dev/hda (fdisk is oldschool, just type "p" to the print the current table and then "q" to get out of fdisk after taking note of what partition is still ntfs (or fat32)

If it survived (and you are using LILO), you can edit:

/etc/lilo.conf

and add the line:

other = /dev/hdaX (where X is the partition number from above)
table = /dev/hda
label = windows

And then re-run LILO with:

/sbin/lilo

If things are a little weird, go ahead and post back instead of guessing, which is usually a bit dangerous when we're talking about the bootloader.

Cheers,

Finegan

where would i even type that.

right now i'm in the KDE interface

Open up a Konsole, become root with the command: "su -" Most of the advice here is going to be command line based.

Cheers,

Finegan