It frequently happens that the wireless card on your laptop doesn't work under linux.
This frequently happens with broadcom card, so beside telling broadcom is a shame you can do different things to solve this:
$1) buy on ebay a non broadcom card, for around 15$ (this will fix everything forever)
2)compile and install alpha linux drivers #for broadcom and extract the firmware.
3)use the damn ndiswrapper..
First of all i must say that not every card will work with ndiswrapper, especially the older version that we have on Etch...
If this is the case, please come on #elive, our irc channel, i backported the latest ndiswrapper for gem..
In order to use ndiswrapper we need the windows drivers:
you can get them from a windows installation where your card was working or directly extract from the archive.
Usually wine can do it even for the most stubborn exe archives.
Then you have an inf file and a sys, or something else...
in order to make them work you just need to do the following operations:
$:cd ~/nsidswrapper (i suppose u copied the drivers here)
$:su
#ndiswrapper -i file-name.inf
#ndiswrapper -l (to check which file have been loaded)
#depmod -a
#modprobe ndiswrapper
in this way you should have your card working, sometime u have to remove the old linux driver in order to do so:
assume that our driver is for example bcm43-xx
lsmod | grep bc
#rmmod bcm43-xx
the backlist that module on /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
if everything works correctly you can make the changes permanent by:
#ndiswrapper -m
sometime this is not sufficient, but you can just add ndiswrapper module to /etc/modules
Then you are set up.