Wireless issues in ubuntu 8.1

I have an aspire 3002LC with a Asus WL-107g PCICIA card for wireless networking/internet, running Intrepid 8.1.

I am a newbie to linux, so please go gently. :-)

Over the past few weeks I have been battling to get the card to work properly using the default drivers in linux. The maximum rate I have been able to achieve is about 1mb and the signal strength has been weak, even sitting beside the AP.

I picked up much advice on another forum, but it would appear that I have only made matters worse.

I installed a utility which allows me to run native XP drivers, hoping this would solve the issues. However, I was not able to configure the driver using the utility (Windows Wireless Drivers). Previously I had replaced network manager with WICD. And I reconfigured there. All was working well until restart. WICD couldn't even see the wireless. I changed a few settings on the router (using ethernet), and tried again after a restart. This time the AP showed up in WICD, but wouldn't connect siting "Validation authenication", and not going any further.

Someone on another forum suggested that it could be that both the ndiwrapper and native linux drivers could be interfering with each other, and the native one ought to be disabled. But to this point, no-one has been able to enlighten me exactly how to do this.

None of this is a problem when booted in XP (I have a dual-boot system).

Here are some codes which I hope will be useful in getting to the bottom of things.

iwconfig..

baldrick@baldrick-laptop:~$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

pan0 no wireless extensions.

wlan2 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Auto Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
          Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:20 dBm Sensitivity=-109 dBm
          RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr=2346 B
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

baldrick@baldrick-laptop:~$
Please note that the card is inserted, but because I can't get connected the essid doesn't show up. It does when it does connect though.

and lspci...

baldrick@baldrick-laptop:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 760/M760 Host (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SG86C202
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS963 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 25)
00:02.1 SMBus: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS961/2 SMBus Controller
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE]
00:02.6 Modem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Modem Controller (rev a0)
00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Sound Controller (rev a0)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet (rev 91)
00:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter
baldrick@baldrick-laptop:~$

I look forward to any contributions that can be made, as I'm becoming quite desperate for a fix.

Kind regards.