I thought this might be a hardware problem, but it does not seem to be the case.
I tried the Lucent ORiNOCO Classic Gold PC Card on my Slackware Linux laptop, and it seems to work fine with the "orinoco" driver. The driver load without any problem. I can scan and connect to an essid. Even the lights are switched on. However, it would be a hardware problem from the iPaq PCMCIA sleeve. I will probably buy another to confirm that. -- David du Colombier