hello there!
at first i have to say that i am new to linux....

i own an ibm thinkpad laptop (r40) with built-in wireless antennas. it has the same chipset and processor as the centrino laptops, but no wireless card. it has a built-in wired networking card. i installed a dell truemobile 1150 miniPCI-wlan-card, which is fully compatible with the orinoco gold card. it worked fine with windowsXP, netstumbler did find some networks .
the first distribution i tried out was knoppix (installed on hd). everything worked fine, i was able to use the wireless card and there were no problems configuring it. but i thought that knoppix might not be the right distribution to start with so i wanted to try mandrake 10.0 official.
the following problems occur:
1.when i boot linux for the first time it says that it found a new networking device, it uses the driver "orinoco_cs" and i am able to configure it. nevertheless it won't work but this is not the critical point.
2. when i reboot linux it says that a networking device has been removed, but i did not change anything. i am not able to install the driver manually.
3. again i reboot the system and it says that there is a new networking card. as you can see, every second reboot it will find the card, but i never changed anything to the hardware.


in case it recognizes the card i am not able to connect to the access point, but this may have different reasons:
configuration of the access point:
-no ssid broadcasting
-wep 128-bit encryption enabled
-sending on channel 3
-fragmantation threshold 2346
-rts threshold 2346
-long preamble
-autenthication: open system and shared key

if there is anything i can do and you know it, please let me know!
thank you
norman