might buy a new wifi card for laptop PC (pcmcia)

[Dennis Kibbe]

Order this card from Newegg

 ASUS WL-107G IEEE802.11g Wireless Cardbus Adapter

It will work out of the box with an Ubuntu distro and with Fedora/Red Hat/Centos witha simple driver install.

Make sure your laptop is, in fact PCMCIA (PC Card) and the newer, smaller express card format.

Current price is under $30USD.

Or if your lappy has an e-ztoget to miniPCI slot you can replace the current (Broadcom?) card with an Intel 2200 from eBay for about the same price.

Did you try the broadcom-firmware-cutter application already?  You can install it with Synaptic.

Dennisk