I found a new distro called Dreamlinux (based on Morphix, based on Debian). It looks great, and works fine with all my hardware... except the network card. The card is a SpeedStream 1024_001 using a Prism 2.5 (or possibly 2) chipset.

The original problem was that three drivers were running for the card: prism2_pci, orinoco_pci (which I used successfully on Slackware), and hostap_pci. After deleting the .ko modules, I am left with only the hostap_pci driver (recommended by someone on the #linuxhelp channel).

Now I believe the problem is that there are still 2 cards shown in iwconfig: wlan0 and wifi0. The only relevant line in modules.conf maps hostap_pci to wlan0.

Actually, iwconfig returns 5 cards - wlan0, wifi0, sit0, eth0, and eth1. I only have the Prism and a built-in Ethernet card on my system.

Any ideas?