trouble detecting pcmcia devices
 

Hey guys,

I have an IBM Thinkpad 760 XL

2.1 gig HD
32 meg RAM

internal floppy,
pcmcia 24x CD-ROM
pcmcia Linksys 802.11b wireless nic card

I'm having trouble finding a distribution of Linux that will work on this hardware?

I tried Slackware, Fedora, Knoppix.. I was able to get the Knoppix boot floppy to work with the pcmcia boot floppies, but I didn't have enough hard drive space to install Knoppix to the hard drive..

so I kinda have a problem.

all I want is a GUI that I can put Firefox and email and something like Gaim on. Thats all I need basically.

but I can't seem to find anything that will detect my pcmcia devices that will boot from a floppy and install either from the pcmcia cd-rom or pcmcia nic card over the internet. I reciently tried that Amigo Linux, and didn't have much success with that either, because I can't find a slackware boot floppy that has pcmcia support on it. THey don't want to detect any of my devices for some reason, not the nic or the cd-rom, if I can get some distro to detect my pcmcia devices with a boot floppy, and then install from either the net or cd-rom I'll be fine, but I can't seem to find one..

any ideas? I even tried to install Gentoo on it using Knoppix, and again gentoo won't detect the pcmcia hardware on the laptop.
so I kinda have a problem..

thanks.

try debian

you will need 25 floppies to install base system and then go from there

:) thats a joke, right?

anyway I tried debian, again it won't detect my pcmcia devices.

I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to split the CD into 25 different floppies, I am not THAT experienced with Linux :)

try using the debian-installer net install iso to install the testing version of debian. it should detect wifi cards properly. it's fairly easy to use.

www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer

you want the i386 version probably.

Huh?

they have a pcmcia network card driver floppy and a net installer floppy for debian... download those and insert the disks when prompted... i did this on a older IBM Laptop and got it working