My Belkin PC Card was always detected automatically with Ubuntu,Fedora, Mint, Knoppix etc. But not Debian. I tried using Network Settings and Connections but must not be doing something right. Is there something I can do to get Debian 5.0 to see my hardware or detect the signal. I've never had to set up wireless manually and Help is no Help.
Any routes I should take would help out a lot, I'll try them all.
Thanks for any help you can give.

First detail the specific Belkin PC Card you have.


I'm just curious. What is "Help"


Check dmesg to see if your card is recognized. Also, see what kernels the other distributions used. The simplest one to check will probably be Knoppix livecd/livedvd. Debian 5.0 will probably use an older kernel. You may be able to get your card recognized just by doing a kernel upgrade. You also need to figure out if you'll need WPA support or if WEP will be good enough for you. Another thing to look into is ndiswrapper.

Start out with dmesg and comparing kernels.

Use
dmesg | more
or
dmesg | grep "wireless"

see the man page for grep to see what additional options you can use.

The Card is a,
Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO Notebook Card
Model # F5D9010
ver.3014

dmesg shows pccard inserted into slot 0, rt61pci

I'm not sure if it's a Kernel problem, I ordered Debian Release 5.0.2 (lenny) Kernel Linux 2.6.26-2-686 from Distrowatch.
For example in Ubuntu 9.04 Kernel is 2.6.28-15-generic, but that's just the latest of many upgrades.

Sorry to be confusing but the Help I refered to is in System/Help and also Debian Documentation I read thru online(one of my other Laptops).

Sorry to sound dumb(I can be) but what is that space bar looking character you type after dmesg and then type grep "wireless". I can't do that. I saw that in other commands and for some reason I can't find that character on my keyboard.

Thank You!