Hi Benjamin, I use a cheap NoName card as well. It works fine under windows. I had SuSE Linux before and it was working after trying a lot of things (including building a new kernel and new PCMCIA). The networkcard even came with a driver (pcnet_cs) that seems to be a little modified compared to the one that comes with the PCMCIA sources.
Right now I'm using debian but I can't get the card to run. The whole system stops. Only the on and off switch helps. That way I don't even know where to look for errors. I've tried a networkcard of a friend today and it works just fine. It gets recognized right away and is even using the same io and irq as mine does. Jens