This will be short and sweet cos it was so quick I have already setup both the network and the soundcard. First the network card a basic 10/100 Netgear FA311 PCI (that I got in a home networking kit (two nics and a 5 port hub). When I installed it into my older machine with a 2.2.18 kernel there was not native support so I had to go hunting and then have fun compiling and installing the extra modules. But with Kernel 2.4.x it is a standard module, just used modconf to add natsemi and thats it !! To check the card I just typed ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.8 netmask 255.255.0.0 up and (as my network is on that netmask) I could ping 192.168.0.8 Sound cards have always been a problem with me in Linux and it was no different today, but I can not tell you how I fixed it only that it now works ;) I think it is because I found the kernel needed es1371 module not a sb one, again I used modconf to add a module. BUT in the meantime I spent sometime trying to get and install ALSA with is fiddley as hell, for instance got to their homepage and click download, select the site and .... just a huge list of directories with tens of files in each, which do I download? well turns out you need lots and I have no idea if any of them are currently making a blind bit of difference to my setup :( Oh and I found that the CDROM drive associated with /mnt/cdrom is NOT the one with the cable to the soundcard so I have to type cdplay -d /dev/hdd to get it to work, but it does so hey. Just on a side note, I used dselect to install lots of cool sounding games and now my machine has slowed to a crawl as I tried each one, not noticing the ones that did nothing were actually loading in the background :(