Hi caitlyn,
Thanks for responding. I ended up trying Xubuntu 9.04 and Zenwalk 6.0 also. They both produced the same results.
How would I determine the chipset / driver of the wireless card?
Right now I am using VL 5.9 and everything works. It would seem that the trouble persists with newer linux distros. Only newer distro that worked was Debian Lenny, but that required a recompile of ndiswrapper and would hang during boot.
My only qualm with VL 5.9 is that it's not as smooth as VL 6.
And to address lsmod and ifconfig -a.
Module Size Used by
3c59x 40616 0
mii 5376 1 3c59x
apm 18780 2
ndiswrapper 185500 0
snd_cs4236 14252 2
snd_opl3_lib 10496 1 snd_cs4236
snd_hwdep 7812 1 snd_opl3_lib
snd_cs4236_lib 15360 1 snd_cs4236
snd_wss_lib 25088 2 snd_cs4236,snd_cs4236_lib
snd_mpu401_uart 7680 1 snd_cs4236
snd_rawmidi 19872 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_dummy 3716 0
snd_seq_oss 31872 0
snd_seq_midi_event 6912 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 48368 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 7436 5 snd_opl3_lib,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss 37408 0
snd_pcm 67972 3 snd_cs4236_lib,snd_wss_lib,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 19976 4 snd_opl3_lib,snd_wss_lib,snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 8840 2 snd_wss_lib,snd_pcm
snd_mixer_oss 15104 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd 51492 19 snd_cs4236,snd_opl3_lib,snd_hwdep,snd_cs4236_lib,snd_wss_lib,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mixer_oss
soundcore 7008 1 snd
speedstep_lib 4740 0
freq_table 4352 0
rtc_cmos 10144 0
i2c_piix4 8592 0
rtc_core 15132 1 rtc_cmos
i2c_core 21268 1 i2c_piix4
rtc_lib 3328 1 rtc_core
shpchp 29716 0
pci_hotplug 27040 1 shpchp
evdev 10144 0
ifconfig -a listed lo and wlan0, but since I could not get connected, I plugged in my 3com ethernet card (3c59x) and that appeared as eth0 or eth2.