im in the same boat as you
i have a built in intel2200bg in my dell laptop. I'm currently trying some of the following. As in literally i'm trying them on my laptop right this second(i'll tell you how it goes).
do a google for 2200bg linux and you will find an intel2200bg.sf.net or something simliar to that. So I tried downloading and installing that but I got an error saying I needed ieee80211 firmware or something. And it said to download from
http://ieee80211.sf.net . So I had to boot back up into windows and download it, so now I am trying that.
ok well that got me no where
i did all this bullshit and nothing worked. Simple things like this should not be so complciated if they expect anyone to be able to figure this stuff out. I know more than about 90% of computer users and I can't even come close to getting the wireless to work on my laptop. It's saying all this stuff you have to do in addition to this current stuff just to use WPA or WEP which makes no sense. If you figure it out post a howto