Problem was, the naughty distros dumped me out at a "command prompt" with a stream of error messages. I knew what they had to be about, but many hours of searching failed to identify the right filename to download. I suspect the right driver file and a modprobe or two, plus some editing of the X-server config files would have made short shrift of it. As ever, knowing how makes it a ten minute job. I didn't know how, and couldn't find anyone who did.
That was about six months ago; since then, I've used Fedora 8 (the one that carried on working) several times - it's the only thing in my study that I can get to talk to the Cisco modem/router.