I noticed that the airport and wpa connection problem keeps coming up so I've decided to try to scrape together a consolidated troubleshooting and configuration thread. This will be a work in progress and I will update this thread as needed.

Get the module
The standard airport module will connect to open and wep networks. To connect to wpa you need the new orinoco driver (and a kernel of at least 2.6.28, but that shouldn't be a problem anymore). The following commands should have been performed with the mint 9.1 install script. But just to be sure you should perform these steps again. You will need to be network connected during these steps. You will need to be wired or using a non wpa network.

As root or sudo...
on reboot verify that airport is in the /etc/modules
if not you will need to add it with and type airport. And then reboot again. In the past I've also added orinoco to the /etc/modules list, just under airport. I don' think it is necessary, but you could try it if all else fails.

To the access point!
Verify that your access point is using WPA1 Personal and not WPA2. It will not connect to WPA2 at all. (UPDATE: At least one person reports that they can connect to WPA2) You also should be using tkip as the WPA Algorithm. It is also nice to know that other devices can connect to this access point without problems. It is impossible to troubleshoot the airport & wpa when we can't establish that the access point is even working. You also need to be certain that your access point is Wireless B friendly. The standard to date is N, and G is the most common. B devices are older and slower and some access points may not be configured to play nice with B devices by default. You will need to google your access point type and figure out the optimal settings to support wireless B devices.

Still cant connect?
As root or sudo do a...
and verify that you can identify your target network. Verify that the stats that iwlist is seeing are the same that you set in the “To the access point!” step above.

You can also rule out a possible troublesome gui connection agent by trying to connect via CLI with steps out lined here.
http://blog.computerant.com/2010/02/14/wpa-with-wpa_supplicant-quick-and-dirty/

If this helps resolve your problem the please post what step resolved the problem. If there is a problem with the mint-installer script then that needs to be identified.

Awesome post!

This already saved me a bunch of time and aggravation. Of course, wicd still won't get past "Obtaining IP address," but I know a lot more things NOT to do.

Thanks!

I tried all that, including putting both airport and orinoco in /etc/modules. No luck.
ifconfig only shows eth0 and lo. iwlist scanning shows an "eth1 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down." Interesting, since lo, eth0 and pan0 just say 'doesn't support scanning'.
Using a 600mhz slot-loading iMac. I'd be happy to be able to use wep, don't even need wpa. Don't even need security, if it comes down to that. (Airport worked fine under OS 10.3.9)

clickelliott: just to be sure that you have an airport classic (i.e. not airport extreme)

give me the output of:

dmesg | grep airport
[ 22.229929] airport 0.15 (Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>)
[ 22.230061] airport: Physical address 80030000
[ 23.435486] airport 0.00030000:radio: Hardware identity 0005:0001:0001:0002
[ 23.442094] airport 0.00030000:radio: Station identity 001f:0001:0008:0046
[ 23.448365] airport 0.00030000:radio: Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 8.70

[ 23.459455] airport 0.00030000:radio: firmware: requesting agere_sta_fw.bin
[ 23.628117] airport 0.00030000:radio: Hardware identity 0005:0001:0001:0002
[ 23.634545] airport 0.00030000:radio: Station identity 001f:0002:0009:0030
[ 23.640648] airport 0.00030000:radio: Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 9.48

[ 23.646764] airport 0.00030000:radio: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
[ 23.652864] airport 0.00030000:radio: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
[ 23.658815] airport 0.00030000:radio: WEP supported, 104-bit key
[ 23.664542] airport 0.00030000:radio: WPA-PSK supported

'dmesg | grep broadcom' doesn't give any output

it looks like airport is loaded and WPA is working.
What does

say?

Thank you guys for the quick help!

In my first post I said ifconfig only showed eth0, lo, and pan0, but I just tried 'ifconfig eth1 up' and now ifconfig shows:

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:65:28:b5:43
inet6 addr: fe80::230:65ff:fe28:b543/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:595 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:25 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:116996 (114.2 KiB) TX bytes:5608 (5.4 KiB)
Interrupt:57

Progress, at least. I wonder if it'll be up after reboot or if I have to start it again?
Anyways, iwconfig sems to show it connected to my neighbor's unsecured network:

eth1 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"ravendreams"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:11:95:3F:CA:FD
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Sensitivity:1/0
Retry limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=20/70 Signal level=-82 dBm Noise level=-98 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:112
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Interface still doesn't show up in Wicd thing, and if I disconnect the cat5 I still don't have internet.
I think I'll try a reboot and make sure eth1 is up before logging into Gnome if possible.
If Wicd still doesn't see it, maybe I can modify the scripts at http://blog.computerant.com/2010/02/14/ ... and-dirty/ to work with my wep?

What you need to do is to put eth1 as wireless interface in the preferences in wicd. Then refresh. Hopefully you can then manage eth1.

You can also try to do it manually with the conenction you have now:

But my guess is that it won't work as you don't have it set up in /etc/interfaces yet. So, first try with wicd, as in my previous post.

SOLVED:

As you advised, I put eth1 into Wicd. I also edited /etc/network/interfaces (which I was unaware of till you mentioned it) as follows:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid my_network
wireless-key 8CE60C441755BLAH2A9E925502
wireless-channel 11

eth1 now started at boot, and Network Manager (Wicd) could now see all the wireless networks, and it automatically connected to my neighbor's unsecured. But no matter what I did in Network Manager, including putting the correct WEP key in the correct spot, and checking off "Automatically connect to this network", I couldn't. When I clicked Connect it would apparently try to connect to my neighbor's network using my passkey, which of course didn't work and looks like a bug to me. When I got iwconfig 'emptied' it looked like this:

eth1 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.452 GHz Access Point: None
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Sensitivity:1/0
Retry limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=28/70 Signal level=-74 dBm Noise level=-97 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:52
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Interesting thing there (to me) was the frequency being channel 9, which is neither my neighbor's (ch. 6) nor mine (ch. 11).

I again edited /etc/network/interfaces, adding auto eth1 (probably what fixed it), and frequency 2.462GHZ (which didn't hurt):

# The primary network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid my_network
wireless-key 8CE60C441755BLAH2A9E925502
frequency 2.462GHZ
wireless-channel 11

Reboot and voila! Automatically connected to my WEP network.

Thanks again for the assistance linuxopjemac!