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Solder Wires to Chipset
There are only four wires used (one transmit pair and one receive pair) used in 10 base-T and 100 base-TX, but in 100 base-TX the other four wires provide necessary electrical buffering. For 10 base-T (as our Linksys is) it is not necessary to use Cat5 or equivalent 4x twisted pair wire, any 24 gauge wire will do. I work where plenty of Cat5e is available, but since it's a pain to untwist and it really doesn't matter, I used good old Cat3 cable (the same stuff I used to install our digital phone system).
There are six pinouts on the top edge of the Delta LANF72768-9914B (coincidentally, most generic cards use this chip, so any card based on it would work for this project). I like Linksys because they're cheap and I've never had any of their stuff fail on me.
If you took your dongle apart you noticed all kinds of weird lookin' stuff in there. All those electronics are for the BNC connection to 10 base-2 media and are completely unnecessary for an RJ45 connection.
Here's the part that took me the longest. The 15 pins that the dongle connects to the card with are not in the same order as the colored wires in the Molex plug in the guts of the dongle. I did all the work here so you don't have to. If you're interested, it's pins 1 and 2 on the dongle that coincide with White/Orange and Orange, pins 14 and 15 coincide with White/Green and Green.
This is not the case with the colored wires, where pins 12,13,14 and 15 are the Tx/Rx pairs.
Anyway, this is all by the wayside because all you have to do is solder the wires to the Delta LAN chip as shown above.
There are six pinouts on the top edge of the Delta chip, and if you're looking at the card with the PCMCIA connector pointing left, top to bottom we'll call them 1 through six.
Solder away! I recommend stripping a little less than a quarter inch off of the insulation on each wire and using needle nose pliers to make a little hook with the wire, bending it around as best you can, and attaching/soldering them one at a time.