what do I do when a new piece of hardware doesn't even show up in dmesg?

[Steve Franks]

The only stumbling block to ditching windows on my laptop is a network
card.  I have a vanilla ath card that works fine under win32 and
fedora, as well as a lucent-branded wi card.  Neither even appears in
dmesg when I put it in pccard0/cbb0.  If I stick a compact flash card
in an adapter, however, it looks to work (haven't tried mounting it).
Anyway, how do I even start to debug this, since I have no output?  I
notice one of the lights on the card flashes when I plug it in, but
that could just be part of it's power-up process...

Eventually, I plan to hack my bios to get a "unsupported network card"
to run without locking up the bios boot process, but from what I've
read, that's alot of work...

Thanks,
Steve