well, there is something definitely weird going on with debian at the moment.
installation of wireless-utils, pcmcia-cs and linux-2.4.21 failed miserably to recognise the internal Texas Instruments PCI 1410 cardbus controller, on which sits a 3.3 volt Lucent Prism2 internal wireless card.
downloading 30mb of source archives (over a 56k dialup) and compiling COMPLETELY from scratch... and it works!!!
bloody stupid. what the bloody hell's going on? something to do with gcc 2.95 and gcc 3.3, or what??
p.s. putting in an _external_ Lucent/Prism2 into the _external_ 5.0 volt pcmcia card slot works absolutely bloody fine, it has its own _separate_ CardBus controller.