I now reinstalled my laptop instead of the upgreade (didn't loose much) and now it works (sort of). For some reason the upgrade messed up my wireless networking ability so my choice was live with it or reinstall.

I now have wireless running again but now things like kismet are broke. To fix that I got the latest libpcap and compiled it but it didn't produce the needed shared object files. I created those today with the help of a HOWTO file. Kistmet runs but it doesn't function.

I previously chose to upgrade because I had heard that the newest kernels (>=2.4.16) were more wireless friendly than the older ones. But since I had lots of trouble with them (compiling and getting them to boot) and MDK 8.2 just got released and it had a new (2.4.18) kernel, I jumped on the upgrade. I wasted several days trying to get that going and several more hours on libpcap and kismet.

Long story.... be content with what you have. If it doesn't work now, upgrading to get to to work better may or may not help. I'm not a limux newbie and I still find myself lost in a sea of libraries and c code that others hack together to make semi-stable, semi-reliable software.

To end this silly (long) post. Now I lost my Orinoco Gold card I did all this for. I still have my company assigned cisco WiFi card.