Just installed Mepis (from the "Point-and-Click Linux" book by Miller; included disc) on my Compaq M700 laptop. Everything seems to work fine except that it refuses to recognize my Belkin Wireless-G NIC. The card is backwards compatible with 802.11b and works under Windows picking up the .11b wi-fi at my local library. But I cannot get Mepis to recognize the card.

I've played around with the WLAN settings in the Mepis Control Center from the desktop, but to no avail. Everytime I boot up, it fails to recognize and the card is dead.

I read somewhere that the Belkin cards use the Atheros chips and they are compatible with Linux, but....

Any suggestions as to a fix, or will I have to buy another card just to run on Linux?

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

Do an lspci and then lspci -n to get the PCI ID of your card, then go to the ndiswrapper wiki and check if your card is supported.