Old Laptop is Running Fine Now
I had to give up in the Linksys WPC54G PCMCIA card and dig out the D-link DWLG730AP router/AP/client device that connects to the Ethernet port. The I did a alternate Xubuntu install of Intrepid 8.10. Then I used Synaptic to give me a regular Gnome install. The last bit was to get all the Medibuntu goodness.
I then had to load Puppy Linux as a live cd and replace the crap Ubuntu xorg.conf file with the Puppy Linux xorg.conf file. Puppy would run the WPC54G card with no ndiswrapper and detected all my hardware to a Tee and Ubuntu did none of that. If I could have gotten Puppy to boot directly from the hard drive I would have kept it as my distro. I tried and tried but no joy there. Maybe some day Puppy will do it all.
Ubuntu Linux with it’s millions of dollars from Mark Shuttleworth and millions of hours of work from the open source community couldn’t do what a "dood" working out of his basement could do. Make this work. That’s all anyone is asking of Linux. Load it, run it, get work done with it. That’s all.