Puppy 2.14: It just keeps getting better ... but

Many improvements have gone into Puppy 2.14, as Desktop Linux reports, and I figured, maybe this is the kernel (and other various and sundry add-ons) that will work with my Airlink 101 AWLH3026 PCI wireless card ... without me getting all geeky and opening up a bunch of configuration files and typing in stuff that I really don't know about ... of course, if said typing was LAID OUT FOR ME somewhere, I'd gladly do it.

I fired up Puppy 2.14 on This Old PC and tried to configure the wireless adapter. As in 2.13, the system found the adapter and suggested the ra61 Linux driver. I have yet to get rock-solid confirmation that this is the correct driver for my particular wireless card (even the same model numbers can have different chipsets -- I'll have to pull the card and look for that info). Again, as in 2.13, if I try to search for networks or otherwise connect with the card, nothing happens, and I can't get into the network settings again until I reboot ...

Frustrating, yes. ... I've read many a post from people who had to do all kinds of things to get their wireless adapters running in Linux. And I am ready to try Ndiswrapper with the Windows driver, but for Linux to really be ready for prime time, all these issues -- networking, sound, reading Windows filesystems, USB, PCMCIA compatibility, need to somehow be dealt with in a less-geek-intensive way. That's what Windows and Mac offer (and mostly deliver) -- a whole lot of hardware compatibility out of the box ... except when it doesn't work, of course (principally when computing "outside the box," which in my case meant using Windows 98 instead of 2000).

I don't have a lot of time with This Old PC, but I'd sure like to get Puppy working with wireless.