[NTLUG:Discuss] A recommendation from the list?

[Daniel Hauck]

Okay so lately, I have been tweaking Linux for a rather silly college 
girl.  I have convinced her to use Linux over Windows and so far she's 
loving it.  Her laptop, however, has some problems.

She has an inspiron 6000 but the minipci slot seems to be messed up and 
potentially the PCMCIA slot as well.  The mini pci ipw2200 device in her 
laptop will not work and the replacement she bought performs 
identically.  I tried inserting a PCMCIA wireless device and the 
messages from "dmesg" is different from the dmesg reaction I get when I 
insert the same PCMCIA wireless device into my laptop's PCMCIA slot.

She confessed that she spilled water into her machine some time ago... 
it was like 3 days before it would successfully power on again.

Her USB ports work fine though... so here's the question!:

What USB wireless devices are known to work well with Linux with minimal 
tweaking and setup?

And on the off chance that her PCMCIA slot is actually okay, what PCMCIA 
wireless devices work best under Linux?