8.2 or more recent?

[Jeffrey Hergan]

Stew,
I did some research on my G3 Series 266mhz laptop and I found that in Yellow Dog 2.3, it's a simple matter of plug and play for the PCMCIA Cardbus firewire card to be recognized and to load the firewire drivers and recognize the firewire drive attached to the card.

But I can't stand Yellow Dog.

So I downloaded the iso's for Mandrake 9.xbeta2.
I tried to set up bootx (Old World machine) but I'm not quite sure what I need to do to get it to run the installer. I thought 'all.gz' was the install kernel, but when I use it it says it can't find initrd. I know I'm missing something obvious--never had a problem with bootx in years of using it.

Anyway, my question is: is 8.2 sufficient to run the pcmcia card for ffirewire?
Do I need to build a new kernel or are the firewire and pcmcia drivers built as modules by default?

Thanks,
Jeff