[Ref 1; Ref 2]

A bit of jiggery-pokery means that this laptop is now working. Last time I recorded that, having tried to ram a CardBus card into an ExpressCard/54 slot, I thought a 3Com USB Wifi dongle might work. I bought one. It does. Had to install the zd1211-firmware package from the install media (note: the install media, not a third-party site) but with that in place, it was a case of plug it in, let NetworkManager scan, find the network and connect. What's even better is that the module's in the main kernel package not a kmp package. Reasons why that is good are below.

Novell bug #350717 is resolved by installing the relevant Factory kernel from here. Reasons for doing this are in the bugzilla entry. Now, this has the secondary effect of meaning that no 10.3 kmp packages are installable. Having removed the need to use one for the Wifi, the only one left was for the ATI graphics adaptor. I switched this to use the radeonhd driver which works a treat. No hardware 3D acceleration but, with a dual-core 64bit CPU, it's not a disaster by any stretch.

A bit more reading upon first discovering that I was going to need to buy a separate Wifi adaptor would have brought a quick resolution at a price that would still have been acceptably small. Incidentally, an external Wifi dongle is needed in the Less Free OS^TM as well as the gain on the internal one is so poor that unless you're in the same room as your access point, the signal is totally unreliable, which makes one wonder what the point of it is...