Even if your Wireless lan adapter isn’t supported natively by the kernel drivers, there is another method to get drivers installed.

For this you simply need the Windows 9x/XP drivers for your specific adapter. On my system I was installing for the Acer (??) WarpLink 802.11b Adapter. you can use lsusb or lspci to find out the name of your adapter and search for drivers online if you need to.

First you need to install NDISWrapper, I found it easier to install this from the Livna repository with a simple

yum install ndiswrapper

Once ndiswrapper is installed you can simply apply the following commands. Be sure to change eu3nic.inf to the correct .inf file for your adapters driver.

sudo ndiswrapper -i eu3nic.inf

next:
check that the driver got installed by executing:

sudo ndiswrapper -l

next make sure ndiswrapper is loaded at bootup:

sudo ndiswrapper -m

next configure your Wlan card: Replace essid with your networks ESSID and enc with your networks key

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid
sudo iwconfig wlan0 enc

Use DHCP to "get" an IP address assigned to your card:

sudo dhclient wlan0

NOTE: if you don’t get an IP address for some reason you may have to click on SYSTEM then ADMINISTRATION then NETWORK and deselect and then reselect the check box to the left of your wireless entry, then run the above dhclient command again. Also if you are running in a shell as root you can omit the sudo in the front of the commands.

You also need to be aware that any updates of the systems kernel will mean the NDISWrapper kernel module will need to be reinstalled on the new kernel