Some mail turned up today, the main things of interest were the PCMCIA wireless card I got off eBay recently, and an IR Blaster cable for my mate's tivo, since it didn't come with one.

I installed the wireless card in my laptop, just to see if I'd compiled support for it into the kernel, when I rebuilt it a while ago.

I hadn't, the card didn't turn up, and wasn't available.

I googled around a bit, to find out details about running a Netgear MA521 under linux, and I found this page, which isn't too useful in itself, but it links to a couple of terrific pages, here, and here.

Regardless of that, it really looks like quite a pain to get it working, having to compile the kernel module, and muck around configuring it, and then the card doesn't use the standard iwconfig interface, you have to use iwpriv calls to configure it.

I couldn't be bothered doing any of it, especially since I bought the care for my mate, and he's just going to use it in windows, so I didn't see the point of spending ages getting it working, when I don't really need to.

Something to keep in mind though, I'll do a bit more research if I buy a wireless card for my laptop (even though it's got one built in, another would be handy, so I could try to connect to WLANs while running kismet to find them).