i recently acquired a set of 5 industrial 1gb cf cards and have been installing various os's for my nec versa p laptop. thus far i've installed win95 rtm, nt4 sp6, win98 fe and win2k (no sp) on each respective card. all run reasonably well even with only 40mb of ram, but my secondary goal of getting a pcmcia bcm 4306 wireless card working has eluded me. i thought win2k would be a slam dunk as i have this wireless card working in a cardbus laptop, but win2k just flat out has compatibility issues with the pcmcia controller in the versa p and there is no remedy. since i have 1 cf card leftover i thought i might try a flavor of bsd, if only for the novelty since i have never worked with it before.

before someone suggests linux, i dual-booted dos on all my installs and can access a damn small linux image using loadlin. the problem with linux is that ndiswrapper does not support pcmcia cards whatsoever and later 2.6 kernels with b43legacy driver modules don't support my card's device id and it's not possible to inject unknown id's on the pcmcia bus as it is with pci (bsd might very well have the same restrictions--i don't know).

given these considerations, would someone please recommend an older flavor of bsd for a vlb, isa (no pci bus) pentium 75mhz laptop with 40mb of ram and no cdrom, but has dos access to floppy & pcmcia storage. i would ideally like something with a graphical desktop and a kernel new enough to support a bcm 4306 wireless card if possible, given my system's limited hardware specs.