Does anyone know if there is an applet for Fedora which allows to see what wireless networks are available? I suspect people will recommend
As to this part of your question.. I don't personally know of any applets exactly.. and kismet is more for finding wireless networks you aren't suppose to find, and logging them all (Oh man, that list goes on.. kismet does so much more, but has nothing to do with my answer for you.. so i wont get into it)
iwlist wlan0 scan
This will give you everything it can see, what their SSID's are, what their mode is, bit rates offered, quality/signal/noise, operating channel, and of course MAC address.
This command also works even under NDIS wrapper if you're using 802.11g with windows drivers on linux.