Technologically challenged

Hard to admit, but currently I do not live up to my geek ambitions: I have several new electronic toys that currently do not work the way I expected them. The main challenge here is the new laptop (a Dell latitude D600) that they gave my when I started my new position at IU Bremen. It came with a 40GB hard drive full of Windows 2000. First of all, I have not managed to connect to any wireless networks although that would be really cool (and other people can easily do that).
Under Win2k, the problem is probably that I have not yet found out which encryption key to use. That problem most likely has an easy solution once I seriously investigate it.

As we all know, Win sucks and GNU Linux is much cooler. Thus I resized the partion (took me a day due to some sectors marked damaged by some hard disk driver) and installed debian. With the help of Christian I even manged to compile and install a 2.6.8 kernel. And with some heavy googling I resolved an interrupt conflict.

Some things that still need some fiddling: Make the irda port recognize my new Sony Ericson T630 mobile phone and transfer image and sound files. Get wireless networking to work (the experimental driver module for the intel 2100 wlan chip is supposed to come in a .deb package that cannot be loaded from the usual debian servers...), migrate mail reading/composing to the laptop (I still use pine running on a machine in Cambridge). Of course just using IMAP to transfer the mail to the laptop is not the hard bit, getting spamassasin do an equally good job as the spam filter in Cambridge is much harder and finally I want become as versatile in mutt than I am currently in pine. I still find that UI very confusing and it does not work properly for me (for example sorting mail semiautomatically in my 100+ mail folders). You see, I am quite behind. And there is also some physics to do....