Ive been fooling around on my spare laptop and put different cores of Fedora on
and the computer uses an ibm a/b/g card
but the os wont recognize the card and doesnt have the software fore it
is there anyway to get the software for the card on the comp or should i buy a card that the os knows?

I am surprised to read such a remark.

Linux has the biggest amount of wireless drivers on earth now. After all, most of the cell phones and stand-alone wireless devices today are using Linux as their core OS, with a kiosk browser based front end for navigation.

Add your hardware (IBM) which have thrown its 800 lbs. weight behind Linux in full force, and you have your driver waiting for you out there to get it.

Even if it is not there, just declaring that 'Linux is short of a driver for a wireless IBM card' is enough to ignite many Linux programmers world wide to rise up to that challenge, and respond to you, personally.

Passing the ideology, going technical; What is your card?

I'm not familiar with what type of WIFI card you have, however I knwo for a fact that your card is supported, we just need to know what type it is.

I own an IBM Thinkpad R40, this uses the airo driver, which on most kernels isn't precompiled so I need to compile my own kernel, but thats a win/win situation, because then I can customise the kernel to my needs.

A quick search with what ever little description of the WIFI card in your laptop, results with a description of it beeing supported in the upcomming MadWifi driver.

i have an IBM T40 and the card is an external card
its a wifi
11 a/b/g wireless
CardBus Adapter pc card

You can try and find your card on the Wireless database it might give some info on how your card is supported.
Altho I'm still guessing its a MadWifi based one.

Do you get anything in the syslog or similar when you insert the card? It's been a while since I played with Cardbus but pccardctl ident (or cardctl IIRC if you have an older version) would be useful to see, too.

Hi,

Now what you need to do is just find out the chipset of your WiFi card. Not every version of Linux supports all the cards, so you need to explicitly download the driver and install the same.

To find the chipset (e.g. RT2500) google it by inputting the make and model of your card.

Many WiFi card manufacturers of do not provide drivers for Linux so then only option is to purchase a card of different make which is most compatible one. In such a case you can go for Linksys is my personal opinion. It also has a USB wireless card.

I think this will surely solve the problem