PCMCIA card
 

Hi! I have a ThinkPad 560X. For those who don't know, or remember, it has 32 MB ram, and 4 GB hard disk (with 333 MHz Pentium processor). It has currently Windows 98 installed on it. I want to ask two questions: 1) Does anyone of you every owned it? Do you know if I attach a new PC card, it will detect it or need a new device driver? 2) Which distro is suited for it? I need the best support for PCMCIA cards.

I don't think any distro would be better or worse for PCMCIA support. Whether a driver is needed or not will be determined by the device you are plugging into the Laptop. If you are looking to use a wireless card for instance you want one that has native Linux support so you can avoid having to use ndis-wrapper.

I'd recommend a Wireless device that uses the ralink chipset if that is what you aer looking to do. ..
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware

the ASUS brand ralink PCMCIA card I bought was $25.00 from New Egg.. Took about 2 minutes to get working in Debian.



as for the specs of that laptop you might want to consider a lightweight distro such as Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux or Vector Linux. or even Debian with XFCE desktop or Xubuntu.

take a look at the Linux on Laptops website for how-to's for your particular model laptop.

Here are some of what was listed.
# IBM Thinkpad 560 [Slackware9.1]
# IBM Thinkpad 560X [Slackware 8]
# IBM Thinkpad 560x [Slackware]
# IBM Thinkpad 560X [Debian Woody & Sarge]
# IBM Thinkpad 560X [Generic]

As Farslayer says, any distro should be okay. The device drivers are all the same in the kernel.

I put debian on a thinkpad 570x a while ago and used a pcmcia ethernet card that worked fine as far as I can remember, no troubles at all. As for wireless... if that's what you're going for... I'm still having trouble with wireless stuff on my new thinkpad x60, but that's a separate issue.