Wifi woes.

[Dom Latter]

I have an elderly laptop for websurfing and listening to the radio.
It was on Ubuntu 7.10 but I think since 8.04 the wifi has been broken.
Upgraded to 8.10, still broken; tried out the latest Fedora, ditto.

Seems that it's a kernel issue, ever since 2.6.17-11:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=358004&page=6

I'm getting mighty fed up of trying out the module blacklisting options
that some people have had success with.

So I am toying with the idea of installing Gentoo because a) it's a 
very old machine that needs a lean mean distro and b) it would be 
reasonably easy (I hope) to pin back the kernel to one that still
works.

Unless someone's got a dead quick HowTo on rolling back Ubuntu 8.04
(I reinstalled *again*) to an old kernel.

Sorry, not really sure what the questions are, mostly I just want to rant
about a kernel bug that was first reported in 2006 and is still being a 
royal PITA with the very latest distros.