Wireless card: how to know which it is and how to get it to work
 

Still, I am quite new to Linux and am running Fedora 8 on a notebook meant for Windows.
Thus, as predicted by the experts, I have issues with the wireless.
The WiFi Radar detects networks in my area, but I can not get into any I should be able to get into. The computer sits there a while 'Acquiring IP address', then saying 'could not get IP address'. No internet.
I do not even know how to get my computer to tell me which wireless card is in there. I guess it's one not yet well supported in Linux.

Questions:

1) How do I get the info of what hardware is in my notebook from my notebook?
2) Once I know what wireless card I have, how do I get it to work properly?

Thank you for any help!

P.S.:
Hardware: Dell Inspiron 1501
Software: Fedora 8, Gnome, WiFiRadar
User: Linux beginner (i.e. Please do not assume I know 'obvious' steps.)

A good method to know which card is the wifi card is the following:
In a terminal type this (run in root mode):
Here you can identify the card by the MAC address, or you can look at the "driver" section. From the driver name you can guess which one is which.
hwinfo is a good tool anyway, since it can provide very much info about your hardware. To know what else you can look up type this:
If hwinfo as a command is not recognised by your system, you need to install this package through your package manager.

Now, about bringing up your network.
You told, that you can detect wireless networks. It is good, because it means, that your card is working with linux.
You also told, that you don't get IP address. This means, that you need to configure your wireless network first.
You can do this in many ways, like configuring manually wpa_supplicant.conf or a more simple way, use a gui to do this, like knetworkmanager. If you don't have it installed, install it with your package manager. Don't worry, it is available for fedora 8, i checked it (here).
Using knetworkmanager is easy, you will know what to do.
Notice: you must know the SSID, passphrase, etc. of the access point to get your network working.
Good luck.