Setting up Netgear MA401 wifi card

Hello and Seasons Greetings to all,

I'm having trouble setting up wireless networking on my laptop. The specs are as follows:

Toshiba Satellite S520
Debian Sarge with Kernel 2.6.x (built-in PCMCIA support)
Netgear MA401 802.11b PCMCIA card
Unsecure wireless network running on Linksys router

I've installed cardmgr and when I plug-in the Netgear card its link LED lights up. I don't see any messages in the logs to suggest if the correct driver was loader or not loaded. "ifconfig" reports that eth0 (built-in 10/100) is still the only active connection.

My questions:

1. Which driver should I install and configure (eg: orinoco, hostap, etc)?
2. Which scripts should be edited so that the driver is loaded automatically when the card is detected?
3. Which scripts should be edited so that the alias "wlan0" is used to represent the wireless connection?

In fact, I'm very interested to understand how Linux supports PCMCIA interfaces, hot plugging, wireless networks, and the utilities that tie them together. I would really appreciate it if somebody could point me to the correct resources.

Thank you,

Salman