I am trying to install a lynksys WPC11 ver 3 card.
I installed Debian Woody with the additional command for the 2.4.18 kernel
I got the message PCMCIA was installed and doesn't appear needed. I removed it.

I obtained the linux-wlan-ng-0.2.0 tarball, expanded it read the README etc.

upon the command make config, it chokes on finding the linux source directory.
so the distrubition doesn't install the source. I run dselect grabbed the kernel-source and the packages that it depends on, as well as kernel-packages and the package that it depends on opened the tarball etc.
so now I am running kernel 2.4.18 and have matching kernel source in the directory (/usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.18) I then set up a symbolic link linux for ease of use. I then tried to make the wireless package again, receiving the same error. I looked through the make file to see if it was simply unable to not find certain files, from what I can tell the files are there (though it is possible that the content is not exactly what is looking for, not sure how to check that) Unfortunately as I am setting up this system, I do not have internet access with that computer and am having to ferry files over quite a bit. Out of curiosity, upon installation does Debian Sarge include the apparently necessary kernel-source files.

Also I tried rebuilding the kernel from the source files, at the time I did the default woody installation which created the 2.2.20 kernel that clearly didn't correspond to the source files that i had. succeeded in building a new kernel but then tags associated with files on a cd had garbled text (correct tags however). Unfortunately I was able to get the Prism package at that point, but still not able to successfully configure. Apparently I did something really bad and crashed my system so badly it refused to boot (something about data in the superblocks not matching data that was actually on the drive). I did research and found how get the 2.4.18 kernel to install instead, successfully did that and it reads things well.

Do I need to rebuild the kernel again and if so are there caveats to prevent silly things like garbled text etc.

Hello there,
My personal advice would be to upgrade to the testing branch (sarge).
Sarge will be the stable release in a few weeks and it is already Rock-solid.
I personally had a lot of problems when I was using woody, and these
problems were only solved by upgrading to Sarge.