I bought a cheap USB wifi adapter yesterday for my new testbed machine.
Luckily it turns out to be based on the Zydas ZD1211 chip, which works
well with the zd1211rw driver and needs no firmware or anything. So -
using 2008 Spring - I just had to run drakconnect and enter the usual
info and the connection came right up, as eth2.

I then updated the system to Cooker, and rebooted. The network didn't
work. Looking at iwconfig, it reported that eth2 had no wireless
extensions, and showed the only wireless interface as
'wlan0_rename_re' . I believe this problem likely happened because the
driver changed from being softmac-based (in kernel 2.6.24) to being
mac80211-based (in 2.6.26); there's some info on the problem here:

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download#Knownissues

Making an educated guess based on that, I
edited /etc/udev/rules.d/61-net_config.rules , removed the line for
eth2 , deleted /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2 (though I don't
think that part was actually needed), and rebooted. iwconfig now showed
eth2 as wireless, and no wlan0_remaster_re interface. I ran through
drakconnect again, and the connection came up and worked.

This should be handled automatically - we don't want to break people's
network when their driver migrates from softmac to mac80211...
--
adamw