On closer inspection the card says:
R02 (instead of R01, which seems to work OK for my colleague!).
The card is blue instead of orange IIRC.

Yast says:
Accton Intersil ISL3890 [Prism GT/Prism Duette]

# cardctl info
PRODID_1="SMC"
PRODID_2="SMC2835W-V3 Wireless CardBus Adapter"
PRODID_3="-"
PRODID_4="-"
MANFID=01bf,4302
FUNCID=254

# iwconfig (Suse 9.2 clean install)
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 NOT READY! ESSID:"Handson" Nickname:"linux"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Channel:0 Cell: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Tx-Power=31 dBm Sensitivity=0/200
Retry min limit:0 RTS thr=0 B Fragment thr=0 B
Encryption key: off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I downloaded: http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/
1.0.4.3 built on Wed Jul 16 11:16:29 CEST 2003 by inlbuild@tix
Put it in : /firmware and renamed it (it's not zipped?):

# dir /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 93996 2005-06-10 18:13 isl3890

My last hope was that I had forgotten to install the prism54 driver, but it doesn't seem to be necessary for my system:

Prism54 Linux kernel driver
===========================
This is the Linux WLAN 802.11(a/b/g) kernel driver for
Prism GT/Duette chipset cards (PCI and Cardbus).
*** NOTE - The Prism54 driver is included in kernel 2.6.5 ***

My kernel is : 2.6.8-24.16-default

I've been searching around the web and it seems R2 will not work well. Since I want to use KISMET, this card is probably worthless for me ... (can't use ndiswrapper with KISMET).

This seems to clinch it - it won't work:
http://prism54.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1027

Note price paid is $0 since i received it free as part of a special offer on one of SMC's wireless routers.

Reviewing this product for linux compatibility by its name alone is a bit unfair since it depends on the revision of the card. Revision 1 is a prism chipset so it should work 'out of the box'.
Revision 2 and 3 however are not prism chipsets (the best information I have found indicates that they are frisbee)

I own revision 3 i believe (its hard to tell since its not mentioned on the box, ive identified it using the position of the leds which varies between revisions) however the ident string reported by cardctl reports 'v2'

Works fine with ndiswrapper but only if the prism54 module is not loaded which SuSE insists on loading regardless of what you tell it (had to modify the modprobe config to prevent it loading).

I currently have it working on a WPA (pre-shared key) network using SuSE 9.3, ndiswrapper, and wpa_supplicant but I have had it working on 9.1 and 9.2 as well with similar setups

thread on getting it working at:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=309191&highlight=smc2835w

NOTE: this is rev 1 (prism duette chipset)

my goal was get this card up and running with WPA since i was able to do that on my winXP box.

i tried prism54 and was able to get that working after having to do everything manually (like download the source and compile it) as my distro is/was a bit outdated. however, the best i could do was get it working with WEP, which was a good achievement but unsatisfactory for the long term.

so then i tried linuxant driverloader and that worked like a charm. followed the instructions and i was up and running in less than 15 minutes. even got WPA to work. so clearly, it CAN work with WPA. but this too was unsatisfactory since i had to pay for driverloader after my free 30-day trial.

finally, i tried ndiswrapper and this is where i dock it points on compatability. unlike driverloader which used the smc drivers from the smc website, ndiswrapper just would not work with the smc drivers. maybe this is an issue with ndiswrapper? i dunno. the fact is, it was trouble.

eventually, on a whim, i tried the netgear wg511 driver from the netgear website dated 09/06/04 ver 2.1.25. and who would have thought that ndiswrapper and this netgear driver would work with my smc card?!?! but it did! with this configuration, it too was able to work with WPA. now everything is great.

i posted many threads in the wireless networking forum on what i did to get everything up and running the way i wanted to. go have a look and just search for my username.

cheers.