Netgear MA521 802.11b Wireless PC Card is one of what you can buy at most inexpensive price. It works with no problem as long as you stay with Windows. However, once you install Linux on your PC and try to setup wireless, this card is not easy to get along with.
I collected some information on how to tackle this problem. First of all, if you haven't bought this card and are thinking about using Linux, you should buy something else. Below is for those who already has it.
Linuxant DriverLoader
Linuxant DriverLoader(http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/) is excellent software which provides a very good solution. By using DriverLoader with the device driver for Windows, you can easily use MA521 card on Linux x86 platforms.
Unfortunately, DriverLoader is not free. You can try a trial version for free, but after 30 days you need to pay $19.95 to continue using it. The price may be reasonable, but you could buy a LAN card that is fully supported by Linux if you had additional $20 in the first place.
I installed a trial version on RedHat 9, and it worked perfectly. I could setup a SSID and a WEP key with iwconfig command.
Using a 8180L driver
Realtek (http://www.realtek.com.tw/) provides a Linux driver for the 8180L chip, which MA521 is using. You can download it from here. The following pages has good tips on how to setup Linux using this driver.
* http://www.coryonline.com/cgi-bin/more.cgi?20031230133142.WiFi.Cory
* http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~rbell/Realtek8180.html
As explained in the sites above, this doesn't work as well as DriverLoader. The interface is not compativle with the latest architecture, so you can't use iwconfig. Instead you need to directly manipulate the driver using iwpriv. And still I couldn't get it work.