I have a dlink 520 and when on lspci -v it recognizes the card as Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01).

I'm using mandrake 10, and loaded the driver prism2_pci and when i do ifconfi -a, there is no wlan interface.

I aslo tried using the source code available at the dlink tech support products site.

I'm wondering whether this adapter would work with linux.

okay, I'm going to guess then that you have a DWL-520 revision E or E1. For those, even though they use the Prism2.5 chipset, they load their firmware on boot (it's not flashed on or anything). You need the HostAP drivers from here: http://hostap.epitest.fi/ . I know other people have gotten their revision A, B, E, or E1 cards to work with the HostAP drivers.

Note: Dlink is an idiotic company, especially with their naming scheme. There are 7 revisions of the DWL-520 card (A, B, C, C1, D, E, and E1). A and B are normal Prism2.5 cards. C and C1 use the ADM8211 or C1 may possibly use the ADM226 chipset. D use the RTL8180L chipset. E and E1 both use Prism2.5 but with firmware loading on boot.