I have tried a ton so far and no luck and I am a total linux newb

This should be a Realtek chipset model?? What have you tried so far?

Fedora Core 4 should work

Fedora should work, as long as the proper wifi packages are installed. Most people expect (rightfully so) that wireless will work "out of the box." The questions are;

1. What have you done so far to get wireless to work. Use the network manager to try and get the interface up?

2. Did you try to configure wirless (the network) during your installations? Or, did you configure the onboard or PCI LAN card on the system during the installations?

3. Did you configure your essid and or if you use it WEP or WPA?

Wireless will not work if you have not set the essid and say WEP or WPA key of the router.

4. What distros did you try so far.

On my realtek system, Linspire, Mandrake 10.1 and Fedora Core 4 work, but not without the above set.

The new release of SuSE looks very promising (I use the beta version right now). The newest releases of Linux are getting better with these chipsets and assuring that the packages (drivers) are installed during the default distro install.

Older versions of Linux need additional packages to get wireless to work, say ndiswrapper, or the legacy Realtek driver packages.