I appreciate you getting back to me. Firstly, a quick question. Are you sure the thing doesn't work automatically? A lot of the pages I looked at seemed to indicate that your usb thing would work with recent versions of Ubuntu. To check, click on the network manager icon in the top right, and see if there are any wireless networks to connect to. No? Assuming that's the case. . .you really need to give up on this. I wanted to solve it for you, but I did some googling and looked at the instructions that come with the drivers themselves, and they're unfortunately going to be beyond you. Most Linux stuff works out of the box, but when you have to start compiling things yourself, making sure you have the right build tools and environment, figuring out where everything needs to go, editing config files and so on. . .it's just not usually worth it.

Now, your immediate problem (the reason "the terminal" can't find your tar and makefiles) is because when you start a terminal, you start in a particular directory, which is not your Desktop. Type "pwd" to see what directory you're in. If it doesn't end in "Desktop," you ain't there. You're probably in /home/username, most likely. If you (from the terminal) were to type "cd Desktop" your directory would probably change to the Desktop (where your files are) and the tar and copy commands you were trying to do would work. However, that's just the very tip of the iceberg, and it gets a lot more confusing from there. You're welcome to keep hacking away at it if you like, but seriously, this is not a good entry-level project for learning Linux. I'd hate to turn you off the OS forever just because of a bad experience trying to get ancient hardware to work.

Anyway, I'm sorry this has turned out to be such a bad idea. Linux is often great for getting old hardware working because there's such a huge community of developers out there, many of whom use your same hardware. There are times when there is no pre-made solution out there, though, and in times like that, it's better to just accept it.