Thanks, Derwin. That's part of it. Also, if you follow Cisco's whole instruction set you'll be recompiling your kernal and other things that you don't need to. Cisco's install mentions "Are you running Redhat 7.1 with unmodified kernal?" which shows that the docs never went past 7.1 to8 or 9- very confusing as written... Here's the process that worked for me, found after looking at some university in Singapore's web pages, various forums, etc...
1. Downgrade the radio as you describe, either in Windows or from DOS prompt
2. Uncompress the ACU tar file from Cisco
3. Execute the sh ./cwinstall command BUT DO NOT DO THE FULL INSTALL (WHICH MEANS DON'T FOLLOW CISCO DOCS OR YOU'LL NEVER WORK). STOP AFTER THE INSTALLER SAYS "INSTALLING HELP FILES". Ctrl-z to abort- at this point you've installed the ACU, you don't need to fool with the kernal or pcmcia files- Redhat 8 kernal has native support- you just need to coerce to work...
4. Run the ACU from it's installed location, set your network parameters. You'll get associated if you did it right- but will not get an IP address come hell or high water until you do the next step
5. As root, run dhclient ethX (where X is the wireless adapter)
6. At this point, you'll be live on the network and have an IP address if you did it all right- works great- with WEP and without
Spent almost 20 hours and had a Unix engineer verify that Cisco docs are not accurate for Redhat 8 and 9. Do it as above, you'll be fine as wine.
Thanks-
Lee
