Some progress has been made with the wireless card. The card now works, but there are still some issues pending.
The mistake I made was that I had the wrong channel listed in the configuration. For some reason, even though my router is set up on Channel 11, the card was actually receiving the signal on Channel 1. Running the iwlist wlan0 scan command gave the following output
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:0D:88:B8:D8:4C
ESSID:"Mittal"
Mode:Master
Channel:1
Frequency:2.412 GHz
Signal level=-82 dBm
Encryption key:on
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
12 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:tsf=000000793b69fbaf
This shows that the channel is 1. As soon as I changed the channel number to 1, the card started working.
Now, the outstanding issues is the bitrate. As you can see from the scan, the card supports bit rates from 1 Mb/s to 54 Mb/s. However, it seems to be running only at 1 Mb/s. I know this because when I transfer a file between two Windows laptops, they take 6 minutes. The same file to transfer between this box and a Windows machine takes over 2 hours. I have tried setting the bitrate through the iwconfig command, but I keep getting an error message saying "Operation is not supported". So, I still need to do more investigation to figure this out.
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http://www.crazyguy.org/article.php?story=20071110173936878