People trying vainly to get linux boxes connected to a wireless router shudder with horror when they hear this word “ndiswrapper”. That’s apparently the only lameass way to connect linksys wireless adaptors in linux. Here’s a good tutorial about how to do this. Here’s a step-by-step set of instructions and a comprehensive list of drivers for each card.
This is utter madness. I actually googled my network adaptor before buying it, but apparently gentoo doesn’t include ndiswrapper support in their LiveCD. I probably will be wiping my half-installed gentoo machine clean and just installing Fedora, but apparently the same issue exists with all linux distributions.
Apparently orinoco wireless adaptors are supported natively in linux. More about that here.