Wireless works great with linux. Mandrake 9.0 on my laptop works at home, at the office, or when wireless is offered in a hotel, etc.
For fun, my son has tried many versions of linux on his 6-year old thinkpad. As far as I know, he's never had trouble getting wireless to work.
You do need to be fussy about your wireless card. Make sure it is suppored.
With linux computing is fun again.
Good to hear you have wireless connectivity. Are your laptops all IBM Thinkpads? I've read that under Linux, IBM's are well supported, but I never tried to install it on mine, Thinkpad R40 and a T23. Right now I got 2 no name desktops I've been messing with to learn Linux, it has been fun, but they won't connect with the wireless cards. Maybe I'll give it a go on the R40 with built in wireless card.
That it is. I'm running Gentoo Linux on a 3 yr old PIII 866 with 256 mb of RAM and I'd bet that performance is within 10% of my 2.6 Ghz AMD system with 512 MB of RAM. Wireless works flawlessly, internet is blazing, and both of my HP printers work without a hitch. Pocket PC support is about 60 days away as well. The only reason I'll keep an XP box around is for the wife. MS Money 2005 did it for me. After fighting for days trying to get that sub-standard POS to work, I decided the less MS, the better.