I have virtually the same laptop, probably about 6 months newer. I had difficulty getting my WLAN card to work as well. I determined that it uses an Atheros-based chipset, which apparently most distros were not including support for in their kernels. MEPIS did, and at the time (early 2005) it was the only distro I found that did. Hence, I use MEPIS.

I would note that I have recently tried an Ubuntu Dapper LiveCD, and Dapper supports my card. For those of you who may have this laptop and are having trouble getting the wireless card working, search for "madwifi" and you'll find some pages on how to get the module working on your computer. Or, just switch to MEPIS/Ubuntu. ;)

I purchased this in 2003, it has been running steady since then and last year loaded RH Fedora Core 4 and 5 on it and it worked great. I recently loaded SuSe 10.1 OSS and it works fine. However when connecting to my KVM swithced monitor, ViewSonic VX910 I can't get X to display properly.
Desktop is way to large no matter which resolution I choose.