seeking help with wifi install

short form: does a 6 year old sohoware netblaster II (model NCP130) pci 80211B card have a prayer of just "working"? What do I need to do to encourage ti to do so? Please use short words. I is new here.

long form:
I am what you might call an unusually uninformed linux user. There are probably a few more accurate pejorative and humerous terms, but lets go with that one for the moment. So I have this box set up by a friend of mine to serve my printer, cable and phone modems out to wifi.

 The box is old cantankerous and pretty martian It's an aging 3xx mhz handbuilt asus p111 that got cranked to 900 coppermine at some point. It dual boots to a spare Win98 drive and we slapped a 5 1/4" floppy in there too just for laughs. We named it "hoopty".

 We bought a netgear wg311 v3 wireless pci adapter and dredged up a couple of old ethernet cards and things. The netgear card was unsupported by any free OS we could find and my freind was about to be shipped off to Afghanistan so he just lent me his wireless access point for the year. All well and good. Except for the afghanistan bit of course.

 So it happens that my sister, a Mac user, is getting an an AirPort basestation for christmas. Her wireless server was a weird old crystal server blade module set up by a former boyfriend and as far as she recalls ran nothing but BSD and some funktacular Unix, maybe AIX, I dunno. It didnt even have the ability to take a cd player in any form. The motherboard is built on a frikin full size pci card and the whole machine is 3.5 in thick. It was busted and no one has any idea what to even do with the thing besides toss it (who wants to go through 4 days work to save a 233 pentiumII that may not even be savable) but it did have a few toys attached to it. One was this netblaster II wireless B card mentioned above, and annother was a hawking wa210 wireless access point.

  Now my sister mentioned that this was the first BSD box that the former boyfriend built by himself so I figure what happened was he put the card in and learned that linux driver and BSD drivers werent the same thing so he bought the access point to make it go. I figure either of these devices can substitute for my friend's basestation.

My first step was to remove the old netgear card and install the netblaster and reboot the machine. Now in a windows box there would be some sort of pop up telling me I had done something with instructions to make it work correctly. I knew that this was linux and in the land of the penguins things are harder, colder, and sometimes smell strongly of herring, but hey, live it up! You never know. So in it goes and I punch the button and the screen comes up. No joy. I find the device manager and it tells me everything is unknown, and the device is made by National Datacom Corperation If indeed I even have the right card.

This is probably therefore not the way hardware configutation is done with Linux. Is there anyone out the who can talk me through this one? I'd really like to get this guy his hardware back without bothering him about it. he's got enough hassle right now. Getting one of the the PCI cards going would be ideal but I would take the hawking access point in a pinch.