I dedicated my old PC to playing with Linux. It's quite a learning curve!
That PC has 2 PCMCIA slots. I have got everything else working (more or less, after a lot of command-line type geekery) - but NOT the PCMCIA Wireless LAN bit. I have several PCMCIA WLAN cards, different brands - none will work under Linux.
That's Knoppix, Debian (various levels), and Fedora. I tried Mandrake and Suse and got nowhere at all with those - maybe because I hadn't learned enough command-line code at that stage.