OK here goes. My old laptop (thinkpad 770) blew up a few weeks ago. I mean it even had smoke coming from the vent in the back. Had to buy a really cheap one. The IBM had pcmcia slots and with suse 9.0 I plugged in a linksys card, opened yast2 and life was good. new laptop is an ecs a535 from wallyworld (wal-mart) with built in wifi and no pcmcia. chipset is airvast taiwan prism3 usb module. I have tried this chip set with suse 9.0, suse 9.1 live, redhat 9.0, mandrake 10.0, knoppix 3.4 (kernel 2.4 and 2.6), gnoppix, phlak, damn small. and Debian sarge. mandrake thought it was a scanner, none of the other dists even detect the chipset. I tried the drivers from sourceforge with suse and redhat, and tried ndiswrapper with debian. I followed the instructions from the top of the debian forum from macondo (really great post by the way) but still no wifi. I'm back to xp again but really want to use a secure os. has anybody managed this chip set with ANY linux distro and if so wich ones?

You want a secure OS? Install Service Pack 2 then!
Just kidding.

See how you go with the Aussie scoundrels

http://www.linux-wlan.org/

and then post back.
Regards
Chris

You want the linux-wlan-ng driver. I am running an ECS A900 using an MA111 (prism2.5)

Sorry for the late post, ran into it while searching for an easy way to switch from modem to nic to wireless usb.