I am trying to install linux on an older laptop, I am a complet newbie to linux so i would like a distro relatively easy to use, other than that i dont care. Here is the system i am trying to install on:
Pentium MMX 233
Belkin F5D5020 PCMCIA NIC
Phillips USB CDRW 500 series
64MB RAM

That should be good for now.

I have tried installing Suse and Mandrake both with no sucess.
The Belkin NIC is not recognized by either installation, Belkin says to use the PCNET_CS driver. Which i found and chose to load from a disk (In the Suse Installation) but unfortunately does not work. in mandrake I see no option to load other drivers and i tried several of their starup disks. All not recognizing the NIC. Than with mandrake I tried downloading the cd's and doing a cd install, but with any of the usb devices startup disks, no cd drives are detected.

Do you guys know of any distros that may work better for me, or some help getting one of these two working, I heard Suse was easy to go to from windows.

Thanks for the help.

OK, first of all, who made this laptop? It might be good to know. And of course nothing is going to detect the USB cdrom drive, it's USB in a computer that is upper X years old (probably). My brand new desktop doesn't even boot off USB! Best bet I think is to find a different nick. See if you can get a xircom pcmcia one, those work pretty good under linux.

Are you loading the pcmcia stuff when you boot the CD?

It is an IDP laptop, i know it wont boot from the cd drive, but i should be able to boot from the floppy, load the cd drive drivers and continue the installation, like mandrake says it should. suse doesnt have an iso download so that is out of the question.

The pcmcia stuff is loaded and the little lights on the cable for the nic start flashing, that tells me it is enabled.

Is there a way i could add the pcnet_cs driver to a linux boot disk somehow and do an ftp install that way. Belkin claims the pcnet_cs driver works with the card.

I'm sure you could. It would probably only involve unpacking the initrd image from the floppy and adding the correct version of pcnet_cs to match the kernel on it. Then you gotta hope it fits back on the floppy...

I did a locate csnet_cs on my computer with Mandrake 9.2 and it's there. Try the same command on your computer, It may be present. Then try as root modprob csnet_cs. The driver would be under the /lib/modules/<kernelversion>/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia/ directory.

type the command in the installer? how do I go about doing that?

The commands I gave above I entered in the bash shell.

As root, you could try entering:
urpmq csnet_cs
It may tell you which package needs to be installed.

the installer for mandrake would not let me type any of the commands, is there an older distro that fits on floppy disks where i could install the drivers and than download a newer version onto the HDD and install from there?

The only distro I know of that you can load from a floppy is Debian. Use the 7 floppies from here:
http://tinyurl.com/2fr5f

OK, your are trying to use a driver during the install process. You need the driver on a ext2 formatted floppy. Press F1 for options when you boot to the install disk and enter expert mode. The setup program will ask if you want to load a driver disk. The disk needs to be ext2 and not msdos or ext3 or the load will fail.
This would be done for example to load in a scsi driver needed to finish the download. If you don't need the NIC card to do an install, you could do the install first, and then try to install the NIC driver after the system is up and runnning.

You can type in certain commands during an install by pressing <CTL-ALT-F2> which will change the screen to an install shell.
I believe that the pcnet_cs driver is included in the distro as a loadable module,
as an alternative, you could press <CTRL-ALT-F2> when the install program gets to the language selection, and enter the command modprobe pcnet_cs.

The problem may be that the pcmcia driver isn't loaded. Use the lsmod command to get a listing of the loaded modules. If you aren't doing a network install, try to get the network card installed after installing the system.

when I do the CTL-ALT-F2 it changes screens but does not allow me to type commands

I found a distro that fits on a disk, and they say they have usb support, with no GUI. i can not mount my USB CDROM drive however.
I tried
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/sda /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/sdb /mnt/cdrom
all times it just says failed to initilize device
BTW, my plan is to install off a cd when i get the cd mounted(if you couldnt figure it out)

You will need to produce a boot floppy designed to allow installing from a usb drive. On Mandrake, I think the image file is called usbhd.img or something similar. What ever distro you are installing probably has a similar boot image file.

i tried all the usb boot floppies mandrake has, it says detecting usb devices and than it says no devices wer found, where the cd drive works on windows so im sure it is not the drive.