Dell Inspiron 600m + ipw2100 wireless card

Has anyone been able to get online on a Dell Inspiron 600m notebook with Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 3A mini pci adapter (pci id 8086:1043)?

Strangely the ipw2100 card is recognized as ipw 2100 3B mini in Mandriva 2006. The driver was properly installed with ndiswrapper and everything but the wlan0 cannot be brought up no matter what I did. I tried using the Linux native driver with firmware but also failed. I tried asking for help in mandrivausers.org and some people did offer some suggestions and I tried everything they said but I am slowly giving up now.

Does anyone here know what I should do? Thank you very much.

Yes, I use the very same notebook and Ubuntu 6.06 detected and configured all of my hardware. Actually, I've been very pleased with my 600m.

The ipw2100 card was detected by Mandriva 2006 but I had to install the driver myself. It was a very easy installation and the network configuration went smoothly but I am still unable to get online somehow. The wlan0 was brought up at reboot every time but when I tried to use "ifup wlan0", I always got "no such device". I also tried "ifconfig -a" to check the status and wlan0 was obviously not brought up. Is there anyway I can troubleshoot?