Ok, after further digging into the subject and sourcing around for hardware, here's some new info re the subject
Prism-based chipsets are hard to find, but Ralink RT2500 based PCI wireless LAN adapters seem to be quite cheap and plentiful locally (significantly cheaper than Dlink).
http://ralink.raplus.net has a list of such cards.
The Ralink RT2400/RT2500 drivers are GPL'ed straight from the chipset manufacturer for them and separate 1.x drivers are available so I would expect these to be pretty mature (if anyone has experience to the contrary, please let me know).
See http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads
They are working on unifying drivers for both chipsets into one module.
Another trick I realized is that if you do not want to mess around with chipsets and drivers, you can just spend extra and buy an Access Point like the Dlink DWL-2000AP+, plug it into your Ethernet port and voila, you're wirelessly connected!
Plus there's the added benefit of being able to use an extra long network cable to position your access point strategically.
In fact this is the setup I'm using right now and it works, except ironically enough it's the driver for this newly bought CNET PRO200 Ethernet card I'm using to connect to the access point that's the source of some problems... [EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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