Okay, took a few hours and reboots but I have procured, compiled and
installed wlan-ng tools. I'm running RedHat 9, kernel 2.4.20-8. Upon
startup I get "OK" messages from "starting wlan" and "configuring network".
IF is manually do:

bash# ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0

then voila! it works, I can ping my router and other machines by IP. My
question is: how can I set up wlan0 to use DHCP? Or even put in a static
IP? I suppose I could put in an ifconfig statement in rc.local but there's
got to be a more graceful way to do it.

On another note, when I do:

bash# iwconfig wlan0

I see that my bitrate is 2Mb/Sec... how/where do I configure this? I
haven't really done any work with linux since kernel 2.20... a few years and
the networking side of things has changed drastically.

thanks

dave