I'm running Debian, with the 2.4.21-4-686 kernel image. I'm trying to get my MA311 Netgear Wireless PCI Adapter working...

lspci shows: 00:0b.0 Network controller: Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01). I'm just going on the assumption here that this card is compatible with the wlan project.

Here's what I've done:
During the initial install of Debian, I selected the orinoco and hermes modules to be installed. Installation skipped network configuration and went straight to "install the base system." I manually went back and selected Configure the Network, but it told me that it couldn't find a network interface.

I have a wired card, so I set that up, and it works great. After reading a bit, I thought that perhaps I'd have to download some orinoco drivers or install wireless-tools, linux-wlan-ng, or something like that. I installed both wireless-tools and linux-wlan-ng, but the linux-wlan-ng-modules... package would not install, because it needed an older kernel apparently.

Regardless, I don't know what step to take next to get this card working.

Note: I'm running Windows 2000 as well, and the card sets up and works great in Windows, so I'm fairly sure it's not a hardware issue.

You may be able to use the orinoco/hermes driver set, but
I have had very good luck with the hostap drivers

http://hostap.epitest.fi/

IIRC, debian has a broken version of the driver in
lib/modules/3rdparty or some such. You may need to
delete those and compile the current version of hostap driver.

You can tell what modules were loaded by typing "lsmod"
on a command line. But I'm not a debian user so I'm not sure
of the specifics of automatically loading things
(an alias in modules.conf or somesuch)

An alternative to hostap is the linux-wlan-ng driver at:
www.linux-wlan.org

hth,

-bbeers