...or rather a debian wheezy success story!!
(I'm not sure where to put this thread, so feel free to move it to a more appropriate place if necessary.)

So, I was trying to resurrect a Thinkpad Lenovo X41 pc laptop that a friend of mine didn't need anymore, and left it to me years ago. I thought the hard drive was about to fail, and maybe it is, it was behaving strangely. I was then told that it connects to the internet via a Linksys Wireless-G Notebook adapter (Model No.:WPC54G ver.3), that this laptop had on it, since I knew it. Well, that means I had no idea that this wonderful laptop has a wireless adapter built in it!

As its windows XP failed and I had no backup cds or anything, I installed ubuntu on it at some point, but the wireless still didn't work (I guess I didn't try hard enough).

As I need a second laptop in the house now, I decided to try again to resurrect it with debian wheezy, and try with a nano usb wifi adapter that I have. I chose this linux distribution because I got to know and like raspbian, the debian version for the raspberry pi.

First I did something wrong installing debian, I accidentally put debian squeeze (the version before wheezy), then I tried to install wheezy but accidentally ended up having both squeeze and wheezy, and being able to boot only with my installation usb stick on.

I wanted to ask for help but I realised I didn't keep enough notes, to give the experts here more details of what went wrong. So I tried again, very very carefully. First I formatted a usb stick and checked it for errors (with disk utility on my everyday entertainment laptop with ubuntu 12.40 on it). I followed the instructions on debian.org on how to make a bootable usb stick with the small installation image on it (i connected the thinkpad online with an ethernet cable). I went to the bios, enabled usb booting, disabled booting from the hard drive (to make sure it runs from the stick, as I lost track of what I had done to the hard drive), and let the (graphical) installer start.

The part about partitioning the drive was tricky, I think I did a mistake there before, I decided to format the hard drive (delete the partition and make a new one), to make sure I don't end up with yet another OS.

There was a warning, about missing firmware files: ipw2200-bss.fw
It said i should put this file in a removable media and press next. So I did, the next warning said missing firmware files: ipw2200-bss.fw and rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin
again, I put these files in a usb stick and pressed next, the warning was then again only for ipw2200-bss.fw, so I tried again and again. In the end I though whatever, I'll install that package later manually. So I skipped it, finished the installation and installed the ipw2200-bss.fw file with the instructions found here.

My jaw has dropped by the fact that it now connects to my wifi without any card nor usb wifi adapter!!!!!!!! I am incredibly impressed, and my only question is, how come it didn't work before? This internal wifi didn't even work with windows xp on it! Oh, and of course, why did this ipw2200-bss.fw not get installed when I provided the file at the system's installation proceedure? And how come this warning about rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin missing didn't appear with the first warning but only with the second?

Anyway, I'm incredibly excited that linux has saved this wonderful laptop, and I take back everything I said and tought about linux when I first had to work with it as a student I love linux now!! And even though I can still hear the scary clicking (of death?) when the thinkpad's hard disk is idle, I'm writing to you from this thinkpad right now, it seems to be working great, and I hope it will last a while longer