This is an old crappy laptop and I need some help getting the sound and network up and running.

I'm running the latest distro of slackware.

http://www.geocities.com/shadyvlad/

That link teases me by saying it has the information that I need, but it doesn't.

I want to get wireless networking up and running on the thing, but he mentions that he's only had luck with Linksys and 3com cards as far as normal networking goes.

I need more help with the networking than the sound.

It has 2 PCMCIA slots and no USB.

I can get it to detect the wireless card I have (D-Link 650) but I don't know what to do with it. I can do
and I get the name of the card back, which is promising.

As far as I can tell, it has no clue that there's a sound card in there... but I know for a fact that there is an ESS688, which is supposed to be supported with the soundblaster driver.

The issue with the sound that I'm having is that I don't know where it's connected because it's not through a PCI bus AFAIK and the alsaconf utility fails in finding the card.

ok to see whether ur hardware are detected or not these commands are usefull: lspci or lspci -v, then check which modules are loaded with lsmod. So post them out when u r not sure whether ur hardware are detected, in general post them out if u asking question about hardware is good n make ppl can answer faster.

Supposed ur wireless device r detected n the module for it is loaded properly. If u got a dynamic IP from ur ISP then try:

dhcpcd -t 10 -d eth0
that will try to get an IP from isp, if u got one than u r connected to internet. replace eth0 with somewut wl0 see "ifconfig -a" for the device name. Btw look into /etc/rc.d/{rc.inet1.conf,rc.inet1} if u have static ip. The command is somewut "ifconfig ip/subnet netmask device" something.

I bet u better ensure that ur wireless card is recognized n module for it is loaded properly first on trouble shooting network..

lspci lists pci devices. This laptop does not have a PCI bus, only an ISA bus. I know that the wireless card is being detected using the cardctl utility. But, I don't know how to set up my conf files so that I can do what I need to do. I used Slackware's netconfig utility to set up my dhcp settings just as I did with my desktop when I installed it, with no avail.