I have an Edimax wireless card bought from the Linux Emporium in my 7-year-old shuttle box at home, and it's happily running under Ubuntu 9.04. (It was less happy under 9.10 as the connection kept dropping, presumably due to a driver problem.) All I did was install the hardware and then install Ubuntu (I'd use Debian before then) -- the card was found and configured automagically, all I had to do was select the network and enter the password.
HTH.
..Adrian -- Dr Adrian F Clark WEB: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alien/ EMAIL: alien/at/essex.ac.uk TEL: +44 1206 872432 FAX: +44 1206 872900 PAPER: Comp Sci & Elec Eng, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK "The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" -- Huxley