Linux Frustration

I finally purchased a new laptop in March. My 2005 IBM laptop was in dire need of replacement. When I purchased the IBM laptop it was bottom-of-the-line at just over $900.00 Intel Celeron D processor at 2.2Ghz, and mayb 256Mb RAM, which I had upgraded to 1Gb. The Intel Celeron D processor turned out to be a disappointment towards the end of 2007. It choked all the time and couldn't handle most of the applications coming out. So I purchased a Compaq Presario V6000 on sale at the local big box company. AMD Dual core, 1Gb of RAM, Nvidia graphics card. Should be Linux friendly. I probably should have brought a live distro to test it out. When I went to install/run Linux I ran into 'problems' with the WiFi card. The card is an Atheros AR5007. Didn't work right out of the box with Linux. So I immediately had to start looking for community support. I haven't had the time to fully research and figure out a solution to the problem. Looks like I will have to use the NDIS wrapper approach, which I haven't used before. In the meantime I have used Innotek's (Sun's) VirtualBox to run Linux without too much fuss.