LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Trying to connect wirelessly using an SMC PCMCIA card adaptor

I've got myself a thinkpad 600E (essentially as a toy) and i've been testing several distros on it. The SMC wireless adaptor isn't something that was originally included with the model (from the company) but it came with my purchase of the machine over eBay. Now, I've been using vector linux, which i love, but which does not detect my CPU correctly and crashes far too often. I find I'm limited to distros which are able to detect my PC and automatically connect (they usually seem to assign it to ath0) and i can not, for the life of me, figure out how to connect it from the command line in other distros (such as slackware and gentoo).

What i need help with is understanding how to configure (and WHAT to configure) in order for my PCMCIA card to be set to something like eth0 or ath0, so that when i type "iwconfig ath0 essid "linksys"" it doesn't keep telling me "error: ath0: no such device".

When i use lspcmcia it registers the card in the slot. When i use lspci it tells me all the pci devices without error, including my Atheros blah-de-blah ethernet card so on and so forth. I know distors like slackware, gentoo, debian, and so forth are, in fact, detecting my hardware, but getting them to connect with it is a whole different matter.
If this was a serious laptop that i needed for work or school i would just stick with Vector Linux and not worry about it, but this is a toy i'm using to learn the ins and outs of linux.

If anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate it.