I cannot get the wifi to work
 

I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 on which a friend has installed linux. I'm not sure that I have a driver enabled for the ethernet card (3Com 59x family) and I don't know what to do or, even, what questions to ask to make this work. Can anyone help? (Please, talk slow - I'm new to Linux). Thanks

The first thing in this kind of situation is to find the friend. If he/she installed Linux, there is a presumption this person knows something about Linux.

Next: Which version of Linux?

Quick scan of Google and the 3com site suggests that "59X" is your regular (wired) interface. To find the wireless interface, open a terminal and try:
dmesg|grep eth
OR
dmesg|grep wlan

The spec sheet for the computer also should tell us what the wireless card is.

My friend has pre- apologized for not knowing a lot about wifi - he prefers wired. Both of the suggested checks came up with 'no such file or directory' but, the spec sheet for the computer '(1)8564x module...card (circuit)....,network...., wireless...., inspiron...., world wide.....' Is that helpful? (the '....''s are actually on the system information spec sheet)

The version of linux is PCLinuxOS - sorry for leaving that out.

The specs don't help--maybe you need to look it up on the Dell website.

dmesg should not come back with "no such file or directory"--try it without the grep---ie just "dmesg". You may first need to su to become root.

Try the command 'lspci' on a console, and post it back, that'll do the trick of disambiguation I guess.
PCLinuxOS it's what we call a distribution or distro, if you want to know linux version it's 'uname -r' command, it should give something like 2.6.24-17