Well, what kind of wireless card is it? Does Ubuntu recognize it at
all, even under the Restricted Drivers Manager? What release of Ubuntu
is it?

Myself, my card is an Ativa PCMCIA card that is a rebranded Atheros card
and the restricted driver (ath_hal) does not work. I had to use
ndiswrapper, which was surprisingly easy to get working.

Are you trying to do this via the command line or via Gnome?