Yesterday I went to buy a PCMCIA Network card for my laptop. Its an old Sony Vaio ultrathin which dual boots Mandrake 9.1/Windows 98. I settled on DLINKS 690TXD because it was the cheapest, and had no dongle.

The box simply listed the hardware specs needed for both PPC and x86 architectures, no OS requirements. It does say it comes with drivers for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux 2.2+.

However they don't have precompiled Linux Driver. Instead they have dfe690.c as well as 2K Text file on using GCC to compile the driver, and use in a range of distros, including making loadable Kernal Modules.

DLINK, my hat goes off to you.

(On an interesting side note, Windows 98 still refuses to work with this card, but Linux detected it automatically.)

Dlink 690TXD and Linux : Wow!