forrestt,
Your advice here is probably the easiest and most sound way to go: If you can find your hw's specific driver in your distro, then by all means use that.
nav123 and bkzhellrell:
For those who have hw not supported by the distro, ndiswrapper lets you use your windows driver from linux. First, do you have both windows and linux on your laptop? If so and you've already got your wireless setup in windows, you're halfway there. If not then you need to download the windows driver for your wireless card as well as ndiswrapper. you can find ndiswrapper's latest and greatest versions on sourceforge here:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/.
After you have the driver and ndiswrapper, put them on a USB stick/floppy/CD/whatever and put that on your linux sys. its easiest to do this from the Konsole:
change to the directory with the ndiswrapper tarball in it, and type this command:
tar -xfz ndiswrapper.tar.gz
where ndiswrapper.tar.gz is the name of the tarball ndiswrapper came in. change to the directory that the tar command just created for you, and type
make
make install
this will compile ndiswrapper from source and get it installed on your rig. now the interesting part of this whole deal. find the folder that contains your windows driver and locate the .inf file. change to that directory and type
ndiswrapper -i
drivername.inf
this installs your driver to the computer. now, you should have functionality from your wireless card. if not, check the KWifiManager (or whichever wireless manager you prefer) to make sure your network settings are set, and go for it. if you still run into problems be sure to make sure your firewall is configged properly (/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny are good places to start), and that you're dhcp server is set (use dhcpcd
wirelessCard).