The trick was to add "sleep 5" in between every step. In a flash of inspiration, it dawned upon me that I am dealing with an Intel Pentium processesor running at 133MHz, the fact that it has a whopping 80MB of RAM notwithstanding -- we need to stop and wait for things to happen.
So the final workflow is this: * Boot without the PCMCIA wifi card inserted * Login to TTY5 (out of the way) * Insert PCMCIA card * After ndiswrapper pops up notice it has seen this: @ Run shell script to connect to wifi @ Login to TTY1 # Run "sudo iwconfig" to verify connection
If there is any interest *whatsoever* I will post a link to my GitHub where I intend (but have not yet) to post my shell script and other useful files related to this endeavor.
