I recently learned a stupid pet trick you can do under Linux with any Wavelan (silver/gold) card. Regardless of what firmware version the card is flashed with those cards have some onboard RAM that lets your soft-load an alternate firmware. Doing so will let those cards work all the way up to WPA1/TKIP standards so you can use them on almost-modern networks. LINK (You are of course boned if the network is limited to WPA2/AES clients.)

Of course that's of little relevance for any other OS but I was amused by it. It let me get an *oooold* Pentium lunchbox computer onto my home network using a WaveLan Silver stuffed into an ISA->PCMCIA carrier board.