Encouraged by this very forum, I binned XP on my old 'kitchen' laptop and installed Hardy Heron. Now, I confess I'm a Mac user and this may have made me mentally lazy (because I have to say that my MacBook does indeed 'just work') but I do have some dim recall of using Unix in my university days. Anyway, installation went fine and up popped the Gnome desktop. I'm in business, thought I.
Not so. Wireless networking isn't networking for me also. The laptop has a PCMCIA Linksys WPC54G (7.1) card which ought to work (as far I as could gather from the inertweb - though it apparently needs MadWifi, which I'm assuming is pre-installed, but I'm not smart enough to tell). It's recognized as containing an Atheros chipset but a message about 'reduced functionality drivers' pops up on first installation and then never comes back. Evidently that 'reduced functionality' isn't enough to link to my network. I couldn't work out any kind of 'device manager', as per Charlotte's earlier comment. It seems to create an 'ath0' device (and not 'wlan0') but as far as I can tell it doesn't see any networks.
In a vain attempt to be clever I uncovered some blurb about ndiswrapper, so I copied the instructions and the Window's driver to a USB drive. This may have been a useful strategy had the USB ports worked, but they didn't. Nothing mounted. To be fair, this laptop doesn't need USB ports so that's not a biggy, but it was a pain in the rear.
So, some faff later, I wire it to my little office server and copy over the files on a wired network (which works fine). Followed the instructions. "Invalid Driver" it exclaimed.
I think it has me beat too. I tried the old IT standby and swore at the computer for a while and gave it a shake. No joy. Do I give up and admit I'm Bill Gates's bitch and reinstall Windows XP or is there something I'm missing? The network uses WPA encryption, but I plug in my details etc. and I figure it ought to work.
iwlist ath0 gives "No Scan Results". No so, because I wouldn't be sending this otherwise.