FindMyChipset

To identify what chipset you have, open up a terminal and type the following with super user privileges,

For PCI devices,

lspci -v | less

Then, scroll to find your wireless device and note down its details.

For example executing lspci -v you get

01:01.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)
       Subsystem: Netgear Device 6b00
       Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
       Memory at fbef0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
       Memory at fbee0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
       Capabilities: <access denied>

Then the chipset for your device is a "Marvell 88w8335 Libertas 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)"

For PCMCIA/Cardbus devices,

cardctl ident

For USB devices,

lsusb

You can also try attaching the device, then run

dmesg

Or you can also look at the file "/var/log/messages" and/or the file "/proc/bus/usb/devices"