Orinoco WLAN - desktop computer- freezes on knoppix and derivatives
 

This has been troubling me for well over a year now, and I've been forced to live in the insane situation where my home server is running Windows 98se !
Why?
Because the Lucent/Agere/whatever Orinoco PCMCIA card absolutely refuses to work through a PCI-bridge on linux. That's right, I do not own a laptop., and I have a WLAN- internet service provider.

The setup goes like this: I must get my linux machine to both recognize the PCI-PCMCIA adapter and the Orinoco wireless (silver) card. Then I must setup the network so it uses a specific network name which it connects to, after that I get my settings from DHCP.

( FYI, the isp requires every wireless card registered through them so it's impossible to just buy a wlan card and surf for free )

Now, I recently bought a PCI-bridge with a Texas Instruments chipset, bacause it was reported to work a lot more often than the one with a Cirrus Logic chipset. I can somewhat confirm this, as I do get a little further with it (it beeps)
While I do use Linux as my daily computing platform, I don't usually have any need to install weird hardware so I'm a bit confused as to which configuration files to edit.

I currently run Fedora core (yarrow), and it seems the network configuration wizard does not want my wireless to work.
(For future sharing of the connection to the rest of the house, I have also a regular ethernet card in the machine (realtek 8139, works beautifully).
It does not matter which card is designated eth0, does it? )

In Fedora, lspci lists the PCI-bridge correctly as Texas Instruments blahblah, and when I go through the wizard, I select "add new device", I select "wireless connection" it then lists available cards ( does not find any) , I go "other wireless card" and I get a list of supported devices. I don't find orinoco, so I go for wavelan2_cs. I fill in the configuration values (network name.. dhcp..) Then try to activate the card. It says "cannot find [the card] , delaying initialization"
I know wavelan2_cs is the correct driver to select from that list, though I'm aware I'd be better off using orinoco_cs, but it's not in the list, so...

I figured since I have Knoppix 3.3, Gnoppix 0.6 and the recent Mepis beta lying aroud, I'd give them a shot. Now here's the weird part (in my opinion)
They all do the same thing in boot. They detect my orinoco card, load the orinoco_cs adapter and the card beeps once. Then it beeps again, a bit lower beep this time. And a third beep. Then the bootup freezes At least in windows, the correct beeping sound would be "bee-BEEP", a low,sustained beep turning to a higher, short beep, teling me all's well in the world.
What I see in the screen is somewhat the same, but with knoppix this last line looked interesting:
Before that there's lines showing iwconfig giving options like "eth1 mode adhoc", "eth1 key off" "eth1 essid any"

I'm a bit reluctant to switch distros to get this working, so I'd like to stick with Fedora.
Since it seems the PCI-PCMCIA bridge is working correctly, I only need to get the wlan-card to get configured properly, right?
I'm not very familiar with loading drivers manually through the shell, basically i only know that modprobe loads modules and ifconfig shows me the network is not working ;)
I'd like to know which files i need to edit to get the correct values filled in and if there's some magical trick to be done.
I have read the Jean Tourillhe's pages and just about every wlan-topic in this forum, but all the issues I can find are related to laptops or some home-wlan network.

Please, help me get rid of the crash-prone Win98se server.