I'm trying to setup my SMC ACX100 based PC card on my laptop running Mandrake 9.2, but am having problem getting it to work the way i'd like. I followed Craig's ACX100 HowTo and was able to get the card working, but only when the machine is docked.

My laptop has a 10/100 LAN connection through its port replicator (eth0). I followed the HowTo and setup the wireless card as eth1. It works well when the machine is docked, but not when it's not docked. My laptop's built-in NIC is only accessible through the port replicator, so if the machine is not docked, it looses the NIC. In this case, when the machine is booted, the wireless card gets assigned eth0 and does not work.

The two networks are also on different subnets. The wireless one uses dhcp, while the other does not.

I was thinking that if the wireless card were defined as wlan0 it would not have this problem, but I am new to Linux and not sure how to accomplish this.

Yes, mjia I believe your best bet is to set your card up using wlan0. If you follow Craig's list of things to do substituting wlan0 for eth0 you should have sucess. I have a Sony laptop and I have succeeded in using a SpeedStream acx100 and finally a D-link DWL-650+ acx100. I am using Mandrake 9.1 and as I went through Craig's setup, ironically Mandrake kept wanting to associate the card with wlan0 despite my efforts to make it eth0. So I just set it up using wlan0.
I was then still having problems getting it to work when I discovered that the ifcfg-wlan0 file didn't exist in: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/. So I copied the ifcfg-eth0 file that I had given up on and then renamed the copy ifcfg-wlan0. I of course edited that new file's first line to: DEVICE=wlan0 with the remaining lines as they were for the acx100 card. I rebooted with the card already plugged in and it came to life. I am using the D-link every day now thanks to Craig's help. http://www.houseofcraig.net/indx.php
Good luck,