The following worked with Dell Truemobile wireless card as well as
Lucent Orinoco Silver card on Dell L400 laptop running SuSE Linux 7.3

1. installed wireless_tools from distribution (it is not installed
by default and impossible to find in the menus, I found the rpm
by the find command on the distribution DVD and installed manually by
rpm -ivh)

2. configured the card manually
iwconfig eth1 essid any mode Managed key off
checked by lsmod that orinoco_cs is loaded
checked by iwconfig eth1 that the card sees the access point MAC
made the configuration permanent: added at top of
/etc/pcmcia/wireless.conf

*,*,*,*)
    INFO="Any ESSID"
    ESSID="any"
    KEY="off"
    MODE="Managed"
    ;;

3. changed in /etc/pcmcia/network.conf first DHCP="n" to "y"
because the docs says so but that is pointless, read on:
commented out in /etc/pcmcia/network the line
        /etc/init.d/dhclient start $DEVICE
and replaced by
        /sbin/dhcpcd -d -H -D -t 9999 $DEVICE
because there is an error in /etc/init.d/dhclient - it will exit with
"dhcp client already running". This is wrong because dhcpcd runs on the
builtin eth0 interface but not on wireless interface eth1, which did not
exist when dhclient was executed at startup.