My card doesn't support WPA2. So, I guess xwlan isn't going to help in this instance right?
Wrong. XWLAN is the program that connects WiFi to the hot spot, whether it is an open hot spot (no security), or using one of the, so called, secure connections (WEM, WPA, or WPA2). The security level, that you need, depends on how the hot spot (your router) is configured, and capable of. The suggestion that WPA2 may not work is valid (WPA may not work either), and that can happen even if the device does support WPA or WPA2. You probably don't want to actually use the device, if it won't connect at one of those two levels. This "security" has nothing, at all, to do with buying things on the internet. It is to prevent people from logging into your router, and using it (possibly to send SPAM, or PORN, to the world). Even WEP is so easy to bypass, that any high school kid can o it in about a minute.
We need to know, exactly, what the hardware is, to make intelligent suggestions. See my previous post. Please tell us what driver you are trying to use. Without all of that information, we can only guess at what you are trying to do, and there are a lot of possibilities.
Also, seriously consider getting, and using, an external WiFi adapter (that plugs into the wired LAN connector) for security reasons, as well as connection speed, unless you are doing this just for laughs. They are not very expensive, and will work a whole lot better than some antique PCMCIA card ever could. If you are doing this for laughs, READ every word in the documentation, at least three times, then ask questions about what you don't understand. There is no easy way to figure this out, and the solution may be completely different, for different hardware, and driver, combinations. It is also very likely that your hardware simply has no driver.
Ok, let me state again, I am using a Dell Inspiron 3200 laptop roughly 1998 vintage. I am using a PCMCIA wifi card, a Compaq WL 100. The driver I am using for it is genprism.2.0rc4. The card is active and recognized by the system. Using DHCP does not work, however, if I use manual mode with a static IP the card will successfully ping my Wifi router. It WILL NOT ping external URLs such as Google etc. This card is old, it does not support WPA/WPA2 which is what is used by my wifi router (Xfinity/Comcast).
For the PCMCIA bus driver I am using the dell.exe driver which I downloaded from the OS2Site repository. Sorry, I don't have any further info on the Card bus driver. It is equivalent roughly to the IBM PlayatWill driver.
Let me also state that I am not doing this for shits and giggles. I use the OS/2 system with my amateur radio set up and I take it seriously. I wanted a reliable os that I could depend on and that had DOS capability. I'm not doing this to pass the time or just to play around. Having internet access would be helpful for logging, QSLing etc. instead of having to transfer data over to my main system on a CD to log or to QSL from.
This laptop does NOT have a LAN or ethernet port, I suppose this could be remedied with a PCMCIA NIC card and then I could add the adapter you mentioned.
So, will XWLAN work or not? If not then I guess I need to start searching for the NIC pc card and the wifi adapter you mentioned.
Tell me directly what you want to know, or see, and I will do my best to get it for you. I'm not asking anybody to figure this out for me, I just need guidance and information, it's all I'm asking for. I know you didn't start out with something different from day one and know all the answers did you?