Homer's wirelss interface failed to start after some hardware work. The system had
some IRQ conflicts between the USB and the PCMCIA devices. After trying to kernel
boot options (pci=usepirqmask, pci=routeirq irqpoll)and various different device
drivers for the wireless interface, I manually finally set the USB device IRQ to 5
in the BIOS. Once this was done, the interface came up.