I got Mandrake 9.0 installed yesterday evening. It successfully picked up the PCMCIA card, and hooked itself up to our wireless LAN first time, no problems. It did ask me for configuration information half-way through the install process, though, which SuSE didn’t. Makes me wonder if I missed it, so I’m about to give SuSE another run.
One thing that both installs had in common, though, was that they crashed out on me after I had been logged in for a couple of minutes. Working happily one moment, then the next minute the monitor shuts down. In both cases I had installed the latest version of XFree86 with 3D extensions, and had the monitor running at 1600 x 1200 in 24bit colour. With what little I know about Linux it could be anything, really, but when the monitor goes blank, I tend to suspect something in the video subsystem. I don’t plan to be runnig many 3D games on Linux, so I’ll probably do the next installs without the fancy stuff, and see what happens.