My sister bought herself a new laptop and gave me her old one, an IBM Thinkpad 770ED. I am thinking about putting linux on it, probably Mandrake or Redhat.

The laptop does not have a NIC card built into it so I will probably have to buy a PCMCIA NIC card in order to hook the laptop up to my LAN. Will linux automatically recognise the PCMCIA card during the install, or do I have to do some configuring after the install in order to get the card to work?

If I remove the card or place it in the slot while linux is running will linux automatically recognise the card as being present/removed?

What sort of PC Cards will work with linux? The IBM www site lists the 770ED PC Card slot as supporting "Cardbus adaptors". What are those?

Sorry if I appear a little clueless, but this is my first laptop.

I installed Slackware 8 on my old ThinkPad 560. Granted I didn't use my NIC for the install, my CD-Rom drive uses the PCMCIA interface. What you need to do is look for the boot disk image that is for laptops, and then a disk image that has the PCMCIA drivers on it. It should prompt for it during the install. It was fairly simple for me.

You mentioned install RedHat on it? I have seen similar boot disk images for RH as well.

Good Luck!

Mandrake 9.0 recognized the NIC in my laptop (Gateway solo 2500) and my SO's laptop (a thinkpad 390 IIRC).

On my SO's laptop, network worked right off the bat, on mine there was a minor pcmcia problem that was easily fixed.

I have put Mandrake 8.2 and Red Hat 8.0 on my laptop neither had problems with pcmcia. I know Mandrake 8.2 suports hotplug I think that is in the kernel).

What sort of PC Card NICs should I be looking for that are compatible with linux? Two cards that are for sale at my local computer shop are the Linksys Network Everywhere 10/100 PC Card and the Netgear FA511 32-Bit 10/100 PC Card. There is also a 16-bit version of the Netgear card. I'm not sure if the 32-bit version will work with the 770ED Thinkpad or not.