[B.A.T.M.A.N.] wireless adapter and linux kernel version

I have been trying to get my wireless network to establish an ad-hoc network and I just can't seem to do it. It appears the linux 2.6.31 kernel does not support the RealTek 8185L (Encore ENLWI-G2) wireless card I have. The drivers it does install are older and seem to not support Ad-Hoc networking.

Can anyone recommend a wireless card and/or a linux distro that easily supports ad-hoc networking? I have the tried latest openSuse and Ubuntu distros.

Is this a common problem with Linux? I have set up wireless ad-hoc networks before in windows and never really had a problem.

Or better yet - does anyone have patches to the realtek 8185L drivers to use the net_device_ops struct as opposed to the deprecated net_device struct?

Thanks

Eric