Installing Mint on an old HP Omni laptop required updating the driver for the Linksys wireless card in order to connect to the net. This is done through the Windows Wireless Drivers section under Add New Drivers. The drivers are located in usr/lib/linuxmint/mintwifi/drivers/386 (or amd64 for newer machines). Once the driver is installed, the connection can be edited for your wifi settings. A system restart should then be done and the connection should be available then.
Found out the hard way that the Mint installer gets hung up if an external hard-drive is attached during the process. Doh!
