I just installed Redhat enterprise 5 on my IBM Thinkpad T42. However, I couldn't find an option to select the connection to my home wifi.

I use /sbin/iwconfig and it does not show any connection either.

Does anyone know how to connect my computer to my wifi network?

RHEL is, by nature, old. It's designed to be stable on servers and workstations, so won't support the latest hardware, especially wifi chips.

A better bet is to install Fedora, which is more likely to come with the drivers you need, but is still structured similarly to RHEL.

The drivers you need to activate your wireless card depend on the chipset. If you post the output of lspci, we can probably point you in a reasonable direction.

I am going to install Fedora 14 instead.

Hangdog42: if I need a driver, do I need to recompile the kernel or can i just do the insmod? This is always what I want to learn when something does not work, e.g., soundcard.

For most wireless cards, you don't have to recompile the kernel in order to install the driver. Usually, you just have to have the kernel sources installed so that you can compile the driver module separately. However, the majority of drivers you're likely to need are probably already available (at least on most major distros).

The one tricky bit is situations like a Broadcom chipset where the b43 driver is in the kernel, but Broadcom licensing doesn't allow the firmware to be distributed. Then you've got this weird situation where it looks like the card is there (because b43 is present) but it doesn't function (because there isn't any firmware).

To be honest, with most modern distros, there is no need to compile a kernel. Hardware support has gotten a lot better over the past few years.