Okay, I've spent several days wrestling with Damn Small Linux. It's a very cool distribution, but unfortunately, I could not get the wireless card in my laptop to work with it. It's one of those Broadcom chipset based wireless cards, unfortunately, and Broadcom never saw fit to release their specifications with the Linux community.
I even tried using NDISWrapper to get Linux to trick out the Windows drivers, but that didn't work either. It is entirely possible, of course, that I did it incorrectly since I'm pretty much a total noob at this.
I wound up finding out that there was a reverse engineered driver for the Dell 1350/Broadcom wireless, but it was integrated in with version 2.6 of the Linux Kernel, and DSL was still using the old 2.4 kernel. So, either I had to find a way to hack the DSL kernel on my bootable USB drive (yeah, good luck with that, noob!) or switch to a distribution that used the newer 2.6 kernel instead.
So, I went back through my list of live CD distros and found . . . Puppy Linux. I know, what's up with the name? The Linux mascot is supposed to be a penguin, not a puppy. Still, it sounded promising based on everything that I had read, plus it had the 2.6 kernel in it, so it should support my wireless card.
I had to burn the .iso file to a CD in order to create the bootable USB key, but I have got to say that this Puppy Linux distro has been amazing. I sort of suspect it's Linux with big old training wheels on it, but I was able to download it, get it installed on my USB key, booting my computer, etc. and all the network related stuff (find and activate the wireless card, use WPA2 to get on my locked down network) in less than an hour. Oh, yeah-- and Puppy has a mechanism that lets you save the state of your session across reboots.
It looks like, for the time being at least, that Puppy Linux is the (don't say it, don't say it) . . . top dog.